Total Immersion: How branding event food heightens impact

When planning an event, it’s vital that every detail is designed in a way that showcases your brand, including the food. By tailoring your spread or designing food gift boxes, you can ensure your voice and style are being properly (and deliciously) represented. By branding food, companies have the ability to truly immerse their attendees in a fully branded experience from start to finish. Here are a few things to keep in mind when implementing branded food for an event.

The first thing you should do when considering how to brand your food is to hone in on your event theme. A few questions to ask yourself are:

1. What service am I providing my guests today?
2. What makes today unique?
3. What food can supplement that theme?

If your brand is hosting an outdoor event, consider giving guests a grab-and-go option. This is not only a benefit to the customer, who only has to grab one thing, it ensures the brand is on full display, without hindering the taste.

For its event, Maybelline offered a classic combination and design that paralleled the nostalgia of the event itself—coke and popcorn. The subtle branding left room for the traditional striped design, and did not take away from the core feel of the food set.

When an event doesn’t entertain a specific theme or you’re having a difficult time matching a design to your concept, think outside the box. Or in TripAdvisor’s case, think take-out box.

TripAdvisor took a classic idea—take-out and fortune cookies—and put its own spin on it. As a company who highlights go-to spots in every city in America, TripAdvisor is a household name in vacation planning. It used this brand recognition and customer benefit to create a new message: by using TripAdvisor, you can plan a new adventure in the future. Bonus: by adding a fun fortune, you’ll both further your brand’s impact and add an extra level of fun to the treat.

This step is perhaps the most important, but it is often overlooked and taken for granted: make sure your branding is obvious and recognizable. With its traditional and memorable orange logo, Veuve Clicquot designed a round bar that not only mimicked the design of the bottle, it could be seen from a mile away.

Customers should know what to expect by the time they get to your food. Taking the time to walk through a customer’s experience from beginning to end is a necessary step in event planning, and one that should be taken very seriously. This means not only branding the food, but the display as well. Elm Planning is an innovative planning company that offers global medical and corporate meeting and event planning from start to finish. By partnering with elm, you can take your project to the next level and create a lasting impression. Contact us to learn more.