Corporate Branding - The Baby Chef

Who they are

The Baby Chef is a new company started by Matt Hazell, an entrepreneur who has won in the Dragon’s Den with a previous business.

The company provides parents with quick and easy ways to prepare fresh baby weaning recipes with the minimum of fuss, and Matt decided to do this by showing the process visually on a DVD rather than in a book – the first of its kind in the busy baby weaning market.

What they wanted

As a new company, The Baby Chef needed a complete brand identity created for them which could then be implemented across the DVD packaging and accompanying website.

They had identified their target audience as Waitrose shoppers who would cook food from scratch and would often read cookery books by the likes of Jamie Oliver. As well as appealing to this market, the branding also had to stand out on the shelf when put next to some of The Baby Chef’s very well established rivals.

Initially, the packaging and website is just for his stage 1 weaning product Easy Weaning, with two more stages to follow later.

What we did

We designed a series of brand concepts as part of a pitch, all focusing on a different aspect of The Baby Chef’s offering – one was geared around the three age groups of the weaning process, another was made to look fun and funky to emphasise the company’s desire to be stress-free, and the final one concentrating on the fresh ingredients used.

We won the pitch against several other design companies, with The Baby Chef choosing the brand designs that focused on the ingredients – a design that combined a clean, classy look with high quality photos of fresh fruit and veg.

Once the corporate identity had been chosen, we set about implementing this throughout the packaging and website.

Implementation included the designs themselves, art directing the photo shoot of the ingredients and finished product, copywriting the site with search engine optimisation in mind and working out a tone of voice for packaging content.

As well as featuring an online shop to buy the DVD, the website also has a meal planner where parents could not only map out their child’s diet weeks in advance, but could also keep a detailed history of everything they had eaten – perfect for tracking the child's progress.

This meal planner, which we built to The Baby Chef’s specifications from scratch, will also only allow recipes to be 'drag and dropped' into place when the child is old enough to eat it, so you can’t plan to feed them something they are not allowed.

The website also has a blog section where visitors can ask Lucy Jones, the company’s specialist dietitian, a question about baby weaning.