Beanit brand design | Kuudes - a creative business design company

The business target

How to lead the overcrowded plant-based foods market?

Verso Food’s innovation cooked up a solution for the food of tomorrow – using only fava beans and water. The small startup wanted to use the momentum from the success of their Härkis fava bean product to push the boundaries further. With bigger ambitions, Verso Food needed a future-proof brand to distance their product from meat substitute discussions and to drive category expansion, something that would cement a strong position in already saturated international markets. They chose Kuudes to help make that happen.

Delicious food for human beans

For starters, we dug into their existing consumer insight and our own Informed Consumer profiles to create synergies for the most fitting target groups in Finland and Sweden. Brand Lab co-creation workshops helped us track down different possible routes for positioning, which were then visualised and tested as scenarios on focus groups in both countries. Through consumer testing, it became evident that the driver that appealed strongest to our focus groups was, quite simply, the taste.

Who would even want substitutes for dinner?

Concentrating on taste was as easy-peasy as the ingredient list: fava beans, pea protein and water, that’s it. Always responsibly produced, excellent source of protein, tender on the inside and crispy on the outside. This product had nothing in common with its rowdy meat substitute cousins. By already being in the responsible, sustainable and healthy category, there was no need to shout about or increase climate anxiety. Making a good choice can be fun and flavoursome. Just enjoy the taste, and the rest will follow.

Once the positioning was clear, we created a brand strategy, name, main messages and visual identity. In a category, where many brands use gimmicky, fabricated names for their vegetable proteins, we chose to keep it clean and straight-forward – who would want to eat oddly-named substitutes? Finding the perfect brand name that works worldwide craved not only extensive research on intellectual property rights, but also testing in several markets. Beanit came out as the best performing brand name, setting a playful beat for the tone-of-voice.

Where have you Beanit all my life?

To hit exactly the right note, we worked closely with our focus groups and tested the routes for visual identity throughout the process. The inspiration for logo and typography springs from the curvy little bean, complimented with a natural, down-to-earth colour palette of exotic, delicious foods and spices. The descriptive and abstract illustration styles represent flavours and tastes, which can easily be scaled into any product line extension. After Verso Food welcomed the Norwegian Kavli Group as their new owner, Beanit is beefed out and ready to execute their brand-new worldwide mission: to normalise plant-based eating with tasty fava beans that can charm the socks off of anyone, regardless of their diet. Just Beanit!