The VegCø Story
After a few happy accidents, a bit of luck and a whole lot of hard work, Ellie at The Veg Company found herself with a growing business.
Ellie came to us with a tasty plan to take The Veg Company to the next level. She had been making homegrown preserves for over a year - and it was clear from her early successes that there was something in this sauce making business. It was time to scale up, so she approached us to develop a brand identity and packaging for her existing product range.
We kicked off the project with a trip to Ellie’s family farm Kinknockie, which is also the location of the very cool Veg Company greenhouse where Ellie grows her ingredients. This isn’t your normal greenhouse, The Veg Company greenhouse is essentially a high powered grow room. It’s run completely by sustainable electricity made on site with the grass cuttings from surrounding fields - This is all thanks to their Anaerobic Digester (AD)!
We quickly learned that this monster of a greenhouse had originally started off in 2015 as a small indoor plot with Ellie intending to grow veg for her family/friends. Ellie’s initial 'try it and see' idea very quickly began growing arms and legs. Soon, she was harvesting unimaginable amount of produce and she turned her hand to jam making to use of some excess produce. With a bit of trial and error, a lot of kitchen experiments, Ellie was soon becoming the master of chilli based jams and sauces.
On site at the farm, we witnessed the different steps of the process - from seed to labelling and everything in between (including a step by step guide to the, very impressive, AD renewable plant!). Whilst at the farm, we used the opportunity to do a mini photoshoot, a excellent chance for a small business like Ellie to gather organic assets and begin to build the VegCø brand - from here it was straight to the drawing board.
It was really important for us to reflect Ellie's full of life personality in the new brand - after all, Ellie is the one who plants the seeds, picks the produce, cooks the jams, pots the sauces, labels the jars and sells the product - Ellie is the brand.
To help make her product stand out in a very competitive marketplace, we shortened the name to VegCø and created a custom display typeface for the brand, alongside bright colour pallette with fun and lively illustrations. The final brand and identity for VegCø is fun and industrial, tactile and subtle all at the same time. We worked alongside top printers Windmill Printing to get the subtle touches and finish we wanted, yet keep budget reasonable and produce a label we were all proud of.
We're still working alongside Ellie to develop other aspects of the brand, but in the meantime, she’ll be selling her sauces all around the country for you to get your hands on - we’ll let you into a secret, they are pretty damn good.
Read our full case study to see the finished packaging and identity.