BRAND STRATEGY / PACKAGING / NAMING / COPYWRITING
Adding substance as well as style.
The River Cottage brand has been a vehicle for promoting an ethical food ethos since 1999, when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall launched ‘Escape to River Cottage’. Since then, the brand has become a household name and the founder Hugh, synonymous with championing ethical food sourcing and production, healthier eating and environmental issues.
In 2020 the River Cottage team embarked on a new mission to bring their food ethos to life. The launch of a River Cottage collaborative food and drink range with the proposition:
FOOD TO INSPIRE CHANGE
Stroud Brewery are flavour forward brewers and perhaps the UK’s most ethical brewery (organic, certified B Corp, value their people and dedicate investment where it really counts) so were the obvious choice for the River Cottage to make beers with. These beers originally launched in 2020.
Despite the quality of the beer the launch of the previous label design was unsuccessful.
River Cottage and Stroud Brewery approached us to help them understand what wasn’t working and improve the design of the range. We identified that in the saturated beer category any new contenders in the space had to bring something new to the party and when targeting the lesser spotted ethical beer drinker, you must stand for something. The proposition - ‘food to inspire change’ couldn’t be a hash tag sign off, it needed substance, something real and meaningful behind it if it was going to resonate with both customers and consumers.
Like Hugh, the team at Stroud Brewery are passionate about organic and regenerative farming practices. They were already working on a project to encourage more UK hop growers to take up organic practices. With the ultimate goal of removing this barrier to UK organic beer making. Greg, being the supportive, knowledge sharing, encouraging beer lover he is, wants the entire category to share his organic USP and is actively helping them get there out of his own resources.
We encouraged Greg, (Stroud Brewery founder) to invite River Cottage into this conversation and consider how this organic hop growing project might influence the theme of the collaborative beer range.
Needless to say, Hugh and the River Cottage team have given their support and joined the three-year trial to identify disease resistant hop varieties and pave the way to making the UK beer category low impact.
A range of flavour forward, ethical beers promoting why they are ‘FOOD (well drink) TO INSPIRE CHANGE’
A trilogy like no other!
Three beers paying homage to the hop – the original and undefeated flavour champion hop’s and its extended family
Is a salute to the Nettle – an essential pollinator habitat on organic farms and not so distant relation
Is a hop family reunion celebrating all the organic hops benefiting from the UK project
Shines a light on cousin Hemp – a regenerative crop and all round sustainability champion
““We enjoyed working with Adam and Jenny at Level, they have a keen eye for detail, a collaborative attitude and a clear understanding of the environmental issues relating to farming and food production.” ”
We had a lot of fun supporting the colab team with the naming and on-pack copywriting and redesigning the on-pack identity. We feel the packaging design system perfectly balances the remarkable flavour profiles with the distinctive identities of these two trailblazing brands.
Available to buy here. Hop to it*
*Wurzel punnage.