The Moment of Change: Waking up

Kanes Foods is one of the biggest privately owned employers in Worcestershire, and we know that it’s not uncommon for big companies to sit on their laurels. The phrase ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it’ comes to mind. The problem with sitting back is that competitors can take the opportunity to kick it up a notch, start making some noise and start winning customers over to their side.

A new management team had been put in place at Kanes over the past 18 months and after making sure the business was on an even keel, they were determined to make a change and stop the business falling back on the status quo again.

The story we told

A key takeaway from our brand workshop is that Kanes didn’t want to look like any old boring corporate monolith. And while the company was started as a family business, they’d grown past that, too. Nevertheless, the business itself had a bit of personality and a sense of fun.

So how do you bring personality and pair it with expertise? We decided to focus on the K of Kanes, something that was always going to be a constant in the business, and the furrows in the fields that grow their products. Stick that with a modern serif font that doesn’t look anything like what their rivals had, and we had something special.

When their team thought of Kanes, they thought ‘green’ for freshness. We didn’t want to do away with that, but we wanted to make it a bit more cool, so we came up with some vibrant colours that suited the new brand a lot better.

Kanes are also well known in the industry for their innovation – just look at what they’re doing with Presto – so we needed to come up with a strapline that would tell the story. After plenty of discussion, we developed Bringing Fresh Thinking to Prepared Food. It does what it says on the tin, and it’s refreshingly straightforward, just like Kanes’ approach.

With a new brand raring to go, it was time to give the Kanes website a total overhaul as well. We developed a custom WordPress site that brought the brand to life and spent two days in the factory getting to know the team that are prepping our favourite stir-fries for the shelves and snapping the perfect shot. All of this was to bring the people behind the brand to the fore, focusing on the great stuff they’re making.

The Mighty change

With a new brand and website in place, Kanes is ready to take on the world. They’re in the middle of expanding the Presto brand to include new products, and their innovation kitchen is going from strength to strength, bringing new recipes and ideas to their supermarket customers.