A New Leaf: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at PBFA’s Refreshed Brand Identity
Written by: Alison Spasser
If you’ve opened one of our recent emails, taken a spin through our new website, or maybe happened to catch us at Natural Products Expo West last week, the cat’s out of the bag: The Plant Based Foods Association has a fresh new look—and from conception to creation to implementation, it’s been a long time in the making.
It’s a crossroads that just about every institution reaches at some point: Whether it’s prompted by shifting strategies, expanding scopes of work, or simply the natural flow of tastes and trends, there comes a time when, to set the stage for continued success, an organization’s brand identity needs to level up in tandem. And since PBFA’s inception in 2016—buoyed by a coalition of just 23 initial member companies—our organization has experienced a natural evolution over time, growing in step with our paradigm-shifting industry, and becoming the leading voice for the plant-based foods movement with a diverse member community hundreds strong. All the while, PBFA has remained rooted in its calling to secure a bright future for the industry and propelled by its mission to better our food system.
With a strong vision guiding our work and ambitious plans for the future of the organization in mind, one thing was clear as day to everyone at PBFA: To accurately, compellingly, and boldly represent this game-changing industry and lead it into the future, it was time to shake things up a bit.
How We Did It
With the entire team aligned on the need for a refresh, the PBFA communications department kicked off a long, methodical rebranding process all the way back in late 2022. But the time commitment associated with this project was, in many ways, by choice: Rather than tap into the considerable resources of a brand and marketing firm, we decided to instead tackle this rebrand fully in-house—harnessing the skills, creativity, and industry know-how on our team to guide our decision-making and shape a final result that fully represents our organization, our work, our voice in the industry, and our community. While it was no small undertaking for our small team, after carefully weighing our options, we determined that leading this process from within was the path that best matched our objectives, our budgetary needs, and our determination that our bedrock vision and values be fully represented in our new branding.
Our overarching goal was deceptively simple: To create a refreshed visual identity and brand voice for PBFA that not only captures the evolving scope, breadth, and volume of our work, but to present a bolder, more polished, and more compelling face to the community and industry it serves—and to an increasingly plant-based broader world. And with this primary objective in mind, we launched a months-long discovery phase that would strip our brand to the studs and deconstruct its essential fabric through a series of exploratory exercises:
- Internally with PBFA staff from all departments, we engaged in both structured and freeform discussions designed to pinpoint the innate qualities that make our association unique, the characteristics that should be conveyed visually and in our messaging, and how we want stakeholders—whether they’re a members, partners, industry leaders, policymakers, or consumers—to feel when they encounter our brand.
- In addition to internal assessment of PBFA’s current brand positioning and future objectives, we also distributed a survey to gather information about the external perception of the PBFA brand from key stakeholders within our membership, which helped us paint a more complete picture of our brand strengths and major areas for growth.
- To support our discovery efforts throughout, we also conducted significant research into the broader brand landscape—within our industry, across a variety of other trade associations, and beyond—to provide more insight into visual trends, resonant themes, and how PBFA could forge a unique path and stand out from the crowd.
After months of research, data collection, and internal discussion, the results of all these activities were compiled, distilled, and synthesized into a guiding brand manifesto that built on our existing vision, mission, and values to firmly establish our brand positioning, value proposition, and personality—a tool that would underpin everything to come as the brand was developed and finalized.
With that essential high-level thinking in place, the work began to bring everything we learned together into the tangible infrastructure of a brand (a logo, a color palette, a set of typefaces, and other visual components) as well as the intangible elements (a persona, a set of talking points, an elevator pitch, and other messaging tools). All of these pieces would need to coalesce into a coherent identity that married warmth and accessibility with professional polish, and put community building and passion for progress at its center.
Throughout the development phase of this process, there was nothing more important to us than establishing strong, unwavering buy-in from across the team. Everyone at PBFA was brought here by our dedication to building a strong plant-based foods industry and our shared vision of a healthier, more equitable, more sustainable, plant-based food system, and we wanted to create a brand that each and every team member could feel proud to represent. That’s why the entire team—including our Board of Directors, all of whom not only come from our member community, but also represent companies with their own powerful brand identities—was provided opportunities to weigh in, provide feedback, and sign off on the final product. While this may have added some time to the process, it ensured that we came out the other side with something we felt even more strongly about, and even greater momentum to finally make it a reality.
Where we landed
Throughout our discovery and development work, we knew that perhaps our most challenging task was to present an organic progression for PBFA’s brand, rather than a total reinvention—to capture and amplify the existing spirit of our community, while injecting our image with the freshness and modernity needed to take our organization into the future. And it all started with our refreshed logo:
While certainly simpler and more streamlined, our new logo retains the core elements of our initial one in a way that’s impactful on both page and screen, and lets our unchanged primary brand colors take center stage—while providing opportunities to further expand our brand story and showcase our work.
The wide-ranging nature of PBFA’s work and stakeholders across our member programs, our marketplace development work, and our policy priorities had, to this point, challenged our ability to juggle tones and maintain the consistency needed for strong brand cohesion. To allow each of our core program pillars to properly shine, we developed specific sub-logos (above) that harnessed both color and typography to bring their unique identities to life, all under one unifying brand umbrella. Building on moodboards we created for each pillar, we pulled typography inspiration from each sector to draw commonalities from their rich histories and visual languages. With these sub-identities at our disposal, we can now more deftly and effectively shift our tone as needed, while also providing additional clarity to our work that will make engaging with our content all the more intuitive.
With our essential logos, colors, and typefaces established, we quickly fleshed out a more impactful identity with additional visual elements designed to bring out our brand personality: versatile patterns that make our communications more playful and expressive; warm, inviting, retro-adjacent photography that centers the human experience of enjoying plant-based foods; and iconography that conveys our program priorities.
Looking to the future
Our fully realized brand identity provides a multifaceted visual language for us to communicate with and about our vibrant community of changemakers, while also maintaining the gravitas of the representative voice for industry advancement and food system change.
Now that our rebrand has been officially unveiled and has started to take shape across our channels, online and in-person, we can’t wait to harness our refreshed identity to forge an even stronger industry and policy presence for PBFA and our community, and to make our communications more engaging and informative for our members and the broader world.
As the plant-based foods industry enters the next phase of its own evolution, we couldn’t be more excited to kick off our new chapter—powered by the collective passion and innovation of our team, our community, and our sector.