HAVE YOU NOTICED, THERE´S BEEN A CHANGE?
Over the last few months, the Liberation team, with a bit of help from our friends, have been working on a new look and feel for the company.
YOU MAY BE ASKING "WHY?"
For a bit of context, Liberation Foods was established in 2006 through Twin, a brilliant fair trade organisation who also had a hand in setting up our sister companies Café Direct and Divine. Sadly, a few years ago they went into administration, but this set us in motion to really think and reflect on what Liberation is...
We´ve always existed to put smallholder farmers at the heart of the business, having part ownership from the outset and looking to do trade differently. And this all remains true. But since our establishment our position within the market has changed and we didn´t quite keep up.
TIME TO REFLECT
There is an undeniable and rapidly spreading interest in knowing where our food comes from. Choosing companies with transparent, ethical supply chains is becoming more important to shoppers and sustainable food production is a hot topic these days. And we probably don´t need to mention how many people are embracing a plant-based diet!
Fantastic! Liberation ticks every box...
On top of that, in 2020 further shares were bought by smallholder farmers, making them majority owners of the company. How many businesses are truly guided and shaped by the small-scale producers at the very start of the supply chain? Not many...
So why aren´t we a staple on everybody´s snack and shopping list by now?!
Perhaps it was to do with the fact that our branding felt slightly tired and outdated (don´t mention the little peanut men again!). Or that we don´t tell our story well enough? Or that we aren´t reaching a wide enough customer base? Or that these days there is some healthy competition out there?
The answer: all of the above.
SO, WHAT TO DO?
With some help from the lovely social impact advisors from Junxion, we did a bit of soul-searching, asked ourselves questions we hadn´t for a long time and delved in deep to where we wanted to go from here. It´s funny how the simplest questions can become mind-boggling when you scratch the surface!
We also took it outside of the Liberation brain and asked other people what they thought, with a good bit of market research conducted by agri-food expert Bob Doherty.
ON TO THE TRANSFORMATION
So after months of unpicking and rethinking we began the makeover.
We enlisted the help of Look At That Studio,who patiently worked with us to visualise where we wanted to go with the brand look. It was here that our new tagline ´Good From The Ground Up´ came to fruition, encompassing all the topics that repeatedly came up: from seed to mouth and plant to person to planet.
The brilliant Rascality, New Zealand-based creative software studios, skilfully transformed our clunky old website to something that looks great and is smooth to navigate - let us know what you think!
Then, as always bringing it back to the source, we returned to our shareholders, the farmers. Work has started on bringing their words, work and perspective to a more central role in the narrative of the business.
Trying to capture more of the essence of Liberation, from a people rather than production perspective, we visited Del Campo cooperative in Nicaragua with Colombian filmmaker Felipe Bedoya. The trip, the first after a long break due to Covid, was an opportunity to re-establish old relationships, build new ones, think collectively about where next and how to talk about the collaborative work between Liberation and the farmers with authenticity and credibility.
As a starting point, we produced this short film.
AND WHERE NEXT?
As you can see, it has already been quite a journey and whilst we have made great headway there is still a long way to go! In the near future there will be a new product range, an eCommerce platform, estabilishing new comms initiatives with farmers and as always improving our sustainability as a business.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg....
Stay tuned, and let us know what you think of the journey so far!
