A consortium of designers, branding professionals, and grocery experts have been named to design a visual identity for New York City’s municipal grocery stores. Their goal? To make something that looks authentically New York. New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) said Tuesday it had selected four firms—Gander, Librarie, Noble Signs, and Seven Roots—to brand the city’s five forthcoming grocery stores, one for each borough. Gander, the strategic branding firm behind visual identities for brands like the squeeze bottle olive oil Graza and Yellow Bird hot sauce, will be the project lead and oversee research, strategy, naming, brand application, and brand development. Their inclusion suggests the finished product could borrow from the best practices of some of recent history’s most popular direct-to-consumer brands. “We consider ourselves, for better or worse, grocery store nerds, and probably get way too much enjoyment out of wandering the aisles of grocery stores everywhere we travel,” Gander partner Mike McVicar tells Fast Company. Gander calls it a dream project since it’s a major civic project for the city they love, and it’s a grocery store. “Our top priority is to help make this ambitious effort to address food insecurity in our city as wildly successful as possible, and ultimately help as many people as possible,” McVicar says. “That means building a brand that resonates with an infinitely diverse population of New York City that has really high standards.” The boutique brand consultancy Librarie, which has advised brands like Stiller’s and the THC-infused beverage brand Cann, will co-lead on brand positioning, voice, copy, and naming. Librarie’s Fern Diaz says she hopes the consortium can turn the language around affordability and abundance from “words that can feel like policy jargon,” into something that New Yorkers “feel and experience.” The consultancy Noble Signs, a multidisciplinary creative studio that founded the New York Sign Museum,

← Back to Designed News