The Challenge
Del Bene is Detroit’s most prestigious produce company. For two generations, the Del Bene family has provided fresh ingredients to Detroit’s top restaurants, including Detroit Foundation Hotel, Selden Standard, Wright & Company, Mabel Gray, and Testabarra, among many others.
The Del Bene brothers decided to host their first event—an invitation-only food show. The Del Bene’s had never organized a food show and wanted to ensure the event was memorable.
Our Solution
One of the issues the Del Bene’s pointed out was that of chef loyalty. Chefs show unwavering loyalty to their vendors; produce vendors are no exception. That meant attracting new chefs that are still in—or just out of culinary school—was critical. That insight led us to ensure our session was laden with ideas around attracting new chefs.
ThinkWell
We interviewed them at length and decided that the best approach would be to schedule a ThinkWell session to uncover new ideas. ThinkWell sessions are day-long, guided ideation sessions that result in dozens of overall ideas, a dozen or so winning ideas, and a detailed campaign that utilizes all the winning ideas seamlessly.
The session yielded 173 ideas for the event, including changes to the website, chef challenges, social media concepts, and a dozen solid ideas specifically around attracting new chefs.
Attracting New Clients
To attract new chefs, we decided to include channels that produce companies wouldn’t consider. For example, we made a custom SnapChat filter for the event, as younger chefs are likely users of the platform. The filter received 16 uses, 49 swipes, and received 1.3k views by invitees.
Fresh Logo and Website
The Del Bene Family is very proud of their brand and have been using their logo for a long time. We knew it meant a lot to them but there were a few things that needed tweaked to freshen it up. We went through variations of updated typefaces that better reflected their new website and cleaned up the produce icon.
Their website was pretty outdated and they wanted to launch a landing page with a fresh look to coincide with their upcoming food show. We played around with produce illustrations mixed with produce photography to make their brand stand out from the competition.
Events
We created other printed collateral including attractive table cards that highlighted specific produce and where it is sourced, a flyer detailing who they are and the services that they offer, and banners they could use at future events.
The Results
The Detroit Food Show was a success for Del Bene. The chefs’ cooking demonstrations were well-attended, and most importantly, Del Bene made connections with, and solidified their already prestigious reputation with several new, up-and-coming chefs.
The new website and fresh logo helped elevate their brand made them that much more attractive to new chefs.
Scope of Work
Brand Strategy
Thinkwell
Information Architecture (IA)
Web Design
Front End Development
Logo Refresh
Illustration
Print Design
Photography
