Building our fatty new brand
Fat is flavour. Fat is emotion. Fat is why Hoxton Farms exists.
Fat makes all the foods that we love and cherish taste good. Fat is the memory stirrer, the thought provoker and the taste maker. We wanted our new brand to embrace fat – to celebrate it, just as we do every day here at Hoxton Farms.
Why does an ingredients company need a brand?
We’re an ingredients company: we make cultivated fats for plant-based meat companies. Do we really need to build a brand if we aren’t selling directly to consumers?
Every company has a brand, whether it means to or not. Hoxton Farms’ brand is more than our business model. It’s about the values, vision and personality that the company represents. Our brand sets the tone for all our interactions, whether with customers, suppliers or potential hires.
Even if we sell to companies, we are still working with people. Creating an emotional connection between people and our brand is essential for us to build lasting relationships with our B2B partners.
By intentionally developing a strong brand, Hoxton Farms wants to redefine what it means to be an ingredient creator. We don’t just make an ingredient; we're on a mission to transform the meat industry and create a fantastically fatty future for anyone who interacts with Hoxton Farms.
Food is all about experiences. A dish is made memorable by its colours, its textures, by the story behind every bite. At Hoxton Farms, we have a unique opportunity to shape these experiences.
Finding a partner
Our brand story began when we met Patrick Niall, Creative Director at forpeople, in a dimly lit hotel lobby at a conference in London. His excitement shone through and we knew that he shared our love for fat, food and science. We enlisted Pat and his team to bring the Hoxton Farms brand to life, one cell at a time.
"What attracted me the most is how fat has gained all of this baggage, mostly negative, but is absolutely at the heart of all the things people love about meat. The sensuality, the smell, the provenance and history of meat all begin with fat. We knew really early that we absolutely had to rebuild the love story, and be as proudly fatty as we could." Pat - forpeople
Creating Hoxton Farms’ narrative
A brand is about a group of people with shared visions, passions and behaviours coming together to build something special – like the ingredients in a recipe. We flew to Amsterdam to join Pat and his team and answer the first questions: who are we? why are we here? what is Hoxton Farms trying to achieve?
We spent our first session unpacking the origin story of Hoxton Farms. Five hours later, with two walls covered in post-it notes (and our Head of People covered in silly putty), we had taken our first step towards the new Hoxton Farms.
We spent a while with the forpeople team teasing out our brand narrative. The Hoxton Hotel became the grounds for lively debate on Tuesday mornings as we tried to distil the essence of Hoxton Farms and every Hoxton Farmer. Eventually we found the answer:
Universal truth: We know that people crave delicious meat alternatives but today’s plant-based meats don’t fulfil this desire because they don’t look, cook, or taste like the real thing.
Our belief: We believe real fat holds the key. It has the power to unlock amazing flavours, create memories and stir emotions.
Our mission: We’re here to cultivate an irresistibly fatty future.
Building our fatty new brand
With a refreshed and refocused “who, why, what and how”, we knew ourselves. The next great step was building these ideas into a rich multi-sensory world – the world of Hoxton Farms. An irresistible world that would make people fall back in love with fat.
Soon we landed on the essence of our character: a blend of our love of historic Hoxton (the central London neighbourhood that we call home) with the brave new world of cultivated fats. We wanted to celebrate the magic of Hoxton and the beauty of fat.
"Hoxton doesn’t sound like where you’d naturally go looking for a farm, but people have been growing animals and crops there since Anglo-Saxon times. Hoxton has always retained this amazing tension of industry and escapism, the past and the future, every ale-drenched cobblestone able to tell some kind of weird age-old tale. We didn’t want to lose that sense of place; we wanted to enrich it with a uniquely fatty vibe." Pat — forpeople
As we found our brand, we found our identity and voice: the voice of an insatiable lipid lover. When we talk, flavour always comes first. We celebrate tastes, textures and feelings, revelling in the details while connecting to the big stories that are shaping our world. It’s why our shimmering monogram is a voluptuous, crispy, sizzling sensation — sometimes feeling like an Old Street tech company, other times looking like it’s come straight off the grill at Franco’s Snack Bar (shout out to the best paninis in East London).
Our Hoxton Farms logo uses a typeface reminiscent of East London street signs, a subtle nod to our heritage, as well as a little sharpness to cut through our rich, bold and mouthwateringly fatty colour palette.
Whether you see us rocking up to a conference, showing you around our new crib or chatting about fatty acid profiles at The George and Vulture — it’ll be with a renewed sense of confidence, a fresh comfort in our own skin and some seriously fatty merch.
What next?
We’ve built a unified narrative for how we talk about Hoxton Farms and a visual identity for bringing that to life. But we’re never done! As with our science, we will keep collecting feedback and iterating. Our brand will grow just like us (and our cells). What looks raw right now will render into a juicy, delicious, fatty story.
We are cooking up some very exciting announcements. Watch this space – it’s going to be a wild few months at Hoxton Farms. All the while, we’ll stay Proudly Fatty, Distinctly Hoxton.