Food and Drink
Fire Island Tea by Stephen Moss
Fire Island has always seemed far more a mythical utopia than a real, physical geographical, location to me; in part simply because of its name: Fire Island seems wrenched straight out of Greek legend – elemental, fearsome, alluring, almost a contradiction as surrounded by water yet inherently burning. But mostly, it’s thanks to Frank O’Hara, whose mid-20th-century poetry eschewed the...
Cashflow Vodka by Marx Design
Few brands dare to break the fourth wall, and all too often those that do, do it badly. Some smash through that wall Mr Blobby style – sure, it’s fun, but it’s so bold that it feels a little ridiculous, à la Brewdog’s ADVERT adverts by Uncommon. Some try to be a ickle-wickle bit clever but land on saccharinely twee:...
Yum Bun by How&How
Arguably London’s street food scene has become less a ‘scene’, more a network of long queues sprawling their way across the capital faster than you can say ‘SEVEN pounds! For some strawberries!’ From Borough to Barbican’s Whitecross Street, Spitalfields to Southbank, Camden to Covent Garden; the menus are global, the prices hefty, the hype palpable, and the branding overwhelmingly forgettable....
Agua de Madre by Chris Chapman
It seems you can’t move for well-designed, wellness-adjacent alcohol-free drinks brands right now. In the past couple of months alone we’ve covered a nightlife inspired Yerba Maté that went hard on Big Drink NRG and Rolus, a new botanically enhanced entry into the (apparently) burgeoning ‘braincare beverage’ category. Making it a hat-trick is London-brewed water kefir brand Agua de Madre’s...
Full Pin by Rethink
Since 2020, engineers-turned-mushroom entrepreneurs Vathana Len and Daniel Vogt have been growing the fanciest mushrooms I’ve ever seen, from their shiny urban greenhouse in Montreal. From Pholiote adipeuse to King eryngii (I don’t know what those are either) and everything in between, Full Pin’s mushrooms are cultivated with meticulous precision and at an impressive rate – over 700 pounds per...
Rolus by Re
Back in the early 00s – the era when arguably Hollyoaks was at its zenith, and bellybutton piercings their most bejeweled – Botox was gradually emerging from the hushed clinics of Harley Street and LA to become part of common parlance. As such, brands cottoned on to the word’s ‘eternal youth’ connotations: I distinctly remember a shampoo ad promising that...
Hip Pop by Robot Food
Running a design blog sharpens your eye for category conventions. Stick with it long enough, though, and you’ll start to see those conventions unravel. What once felt fixed begins to flex. This creates a challenge for writing about design: you’re constantly assessing the landscape, but that landscape is always shifting. Take minimalism, for example. Once the dominant aesthetic of the...
Yaté by Herefor
Long gone are the days when ‘energy drink’ connoted unwashed teenage gamers, amped up Twitch streamers, hungover/still going city boys on the Tube, or 2-4-1 deals on vodka Red Bull in sticky-floored suburban student nightclubs. Like many things – such as reading books, going for a walk, or having a bath – the energy drink sphere has now collided with...
Fuku by Red Antler
Fuku (no sniggering at the back please) is a ‘fine brining establishment’ – i.e. some sort of eatery, you can safely assume – specialising in a specific type of chicken ‘sando’, or in normal language, ‘sandwich’. According to Red Antler, the Brooklyn based design agency behind Fuku’s branding, ‘the Fuku sando first hit the scene as a secret menu item...
Stuzzi by Perron-Roettinger
Hot sauce branding has long been dominated by certain overarching tropes: there’s the hyper-trad (Cholula, Tabasco, Sriracha et al); the twee of the kitchen-table-scale small-batch brigade; and the I WILL RIP YOUR HEAD OFF! camp where products have names like ‘death’. In the first and second of those camps in particular, there’s a lot of decent branding. But this new...
Bettr by Anak
Between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, the coffee industry turned its attention to ‘craft’, elevating the beverage to a gourmet offering. When it came to brand storytelling, flavour notes, provenance and sustainability became key components. These features came to define what’s now known as ‘third-wave coffee’, which pre-dates the gamified science-infused ‘fourth-wave coffee’ movement in terms of textures...
Story Espresso by For the People
The unity of coffee-boffins and great typographic choices seems to be having a moment right now on BP&O. Just the other week we covered the truly superb work for Dark Arts Coffee by Not Wieden + Kennedy. Now, though, we’re heading down under – specifically to the Sydney suburb of Lane Cove, home to Story Café. Story Café opened in...