Orchard & Grain

The Client

Orchard & Grain is a small-batch cereal producer based in the North Yorkshire Dales. The business is run by husband-and-wife team Tom and Sarah Whitfield, who left careers in hospitality and agriculture respectively to start making granola and muesli from grains and fruit grown on farms within a fifteen-mile radius of their home.

They sell at three regular farmers' markets in Harrogate, Skipton, and Ilkley. In the past six months they have had informal interest from two independent delicatessens in Leeds and a farm shop in the Ribble Valley. They want to build a brand that can support a move into these retail environments and, eventually, an online direct-to-consumer channel.

The product range currently consists of three SKUs: a toasted granola with honey and almond, a muesli with dried apple and oat, and a granola with dark chocolate. Seasonal variants are planned.

Tom and Sarah have no existing brand identity. They currently sell in plain kraft bags with a hand-stamped label. The informality has charm at a farmers' market but will not stand up to shelf scrutiny next to established competitors. The brief is to create something that retains honesty and warmth while adding the visual authority needed for retail.

Target Audience

Research & Strategy

I used Miro to get my head around the competition, pull together what people told me, and work out where the brand could sit. A short survey and a few interviews kept landing on the same thing: people are wary of greenwashing and tend to check claims before they trust them. I built a persona around that: Rachel, 34, an architect living in Knaresborough. I kept checking my decisions against her.

What the audience told me

Rationale & Positioning

The research kept pointing one way: honesty over polish. The people I spoke to were more suspicious of fancy branding than won over by it; the harder a brand tried to look “natural”, the less they believed it.

So the packaging needed to feel like it genuinely came from a small North Yorkshire producer: simple, a bit rustic, and easy to believe. I used the fifteen-mile idea as a rule of thumb: if an ingredient isn't grown within fifteen miles, it's not in the product, and if a design choice doesn't tie back to that, it probably doesn't belong on the pack.

I worked up two creative territories. Luxury Editorial felt too corporate and a little forced, so I set it aside. Grown, Not Made felt far more honest and let the provenance story do the talking, so that's the one I ran with.

Type & Mark Exploration

With the territory settled, I moved into Illustrator to play with how the wordmark, county outline, stamp and flavour names could sit together on the pack. I worked up three directions, each leaning on the fifteen-mile idea and the North Yorkshire link in a slightly different way.

Final Mark & Variants

The mark pairs a silhouetted apple (the orchard) with a sheaf of grain growing out of the stem, small enough to work as a tiny stamp but distinctive enough to stand on its own. I wanted it to be easy to move around, so it works just as well printed on a kraft box as it does on a sticker sealing a bag of granola. The circular stamp version carries the “Grown within 15 miles of our factory in Harrogate” line, so the provenance claim turns up wherever the brand does.

Packaging Design

The North Yorkshire county outline doubles as a window onto the product: you see the granola itself inside the shape of the place it comes from. A little “We're here” marker sits inside the outline, pinning the factory in Harrogate. Instead of shouting the distance with a big “15” (something I tried early on), the final packs let the stamp carry the “grown within 15 miles” line and keep the focus on North Yorkshire itself.

Outcome

“Every design decision had to earn its place by connecting back to the fifteen-mile radius.”