Food Federation Germany

Below: Before and After Images in Slide Show, Summary, Credits

Since its inception, the Food Federation Germany (BLL) has represented the food sector throughout the entire supply chain, “from farm to fork”, i.e. the areas of agriculture, food processing, food trades, and food sellers. It functions as a partner for dialogue with political, administrative and scientific sectors, as well as with consumer organizations and the media, especially regarding the areas of food, food production, quality and safety, food laws and consumer protection.

BLL lacked a compelling and unifying way of articulating its distinct identity and experience. The organization struggled to align the overall brand with its different tasks and prerogatives. In its attempt to be descriptive, the name of the organization, unfortunately, turned out to be very long and challenging to use in communication – Bund für Lebensmittelrecht und Lebensmittelkunde. Hence, it became a practice to name the association only by its abbreviation “BLL.” Abbreviations, however, do not tell a story. The association faced many wrongly spelled mentions in various media. Neither politicians nor journalists could grasp what it meant. With this challenge at stake, the association reached out to our agency for a renaming project.

We had to align a wide range of interests and the organization’s various types of heritage. Utilizing a series of interviews, brainstorms, research, benchmarking, and collaborative internal naming workshops, we crafted a new name. We presented the name Lebensmittelverband Deutschland, which had two approval gates, of which the latter had to be confirmed by every single one of its 800 members.

We further strengthened the name by designing a logo that visually represents the “from farm to fork” reach of the organization and conveys its values and message. One thing was clear: a truly iconic brand system would leverage the power of the name recognition. We wanted to convey a sense of humanity and reflect their turnkey approach. Their assets needed to be easy to grasp, telling the story of togetherness and determination to create an impact.

The new name and corresponding brand elements was well accepted, both internally and externally. It reached the most critical goal of clarity for the target audience. A big press conference followed with invited renowned journalists and politicians, resulting in 1500 PR clippings in one day.