This Way Up, a London-based design agency specialising in healthier food and drink, has created the branding and packaging for “flexitarian”-focused new plant-based cheese range, Nurishh.

Chris White, Founding Partner and Managing Director, This Way Up says: “Nurishh ushers in a new era for plant-based cheese, breaking away from muted vegan cues to embrace a playful, inclusive future for anyone seeking out healthier – but still delicious – options. We’re proud to have been part of building the brand from day one.”

Caroline Tilloy, Nurishh Global Brand Director says: “Increasingly, people of all ages and backgrounds are seeking out more accessible and flavour-first plant-based options. The delicious and versatile Nurishh range, designed in partnership with This Way Up, will help retailers meet this rising demand.”

From Nature to Nurishh

In 2020, Groupe Bel acquired All in Foods, a French plant-based cheese start up, with the aim to develop a globally recognised plant-based cheese profile that appealed to mainstream and flexitarian audiences.

Groupe Bel reached out to This Way Up following the agency’s success designing for healthier food and drink brands like Danone and Marmite.

Chris White says: “Working with Group Bel on Nurishh, we set out to create a vegan, plant-based cheese brand that’s accessible – that everyone around the table can enjoy, whether they have dietary restrictions or not.”

Agile Home Heroes

Rather than focusing on the vegan market, Groupe Bel and This Way Up sought to create a brand with wide appeal. Following global brand analysis into the category, This Way Up identified their key audience as “agile home heroes”—essentially parents of teens or carers looking to feed the entire family with the one meal that everyone would enjoy.

TWU worked with Groupe Bel to name the range, and landed on Nurishh to create an ownable brand (thanks to the spelling) and its implications of “goodness”, notions of family and the suggestion of the attributes of the product itself.

Balanced pleasure

Central to the agency’s initial strategic work was “semiotic mapping” of how health and taste are communicated through design. This Way Up says it sees “health and taste as being not mutually exclusive,” and that approach helped to inform the design language used across all Nurishh touchpoints.

“The designs needed to strongly communicate taste, which was a massive barrier in the vegan cheese market,” says This Way Up designer Beth Kelsall. “Nothing in the plant based cheese category was shouting about taste or colour. This opened up a space to create a design which was full of colour, eye catching and appealing for everyone.”

Nurrishh, as both product and brand, breaks with the conventions of vegan cheese—often packaged either as facsimiles of its dairy cousins or with neutral, unremarkable aesthetics that play up to its connotations of restricted diets. Instead, Nurishh’s packs use bright, cheerful colours, playful type, Bauhaus-like modular forms and on-pack photography that dials up taste cues.
The Nurishh logotype is set in all lowercase, and this wordmark is used alongside more experiential, illustrative lettering formed of simple shapes. Kelsall says: “These abstract shapes represent Nurishh’s mission to bring everyone together. All food needs and cravings are fulfilled with Nurishh.”
Stacked and condensed versions of the logo illustrate how the brand overall was created to be flexible across varying touchpoints from digital to print. “As a product, Nurishh makes plant-based cheese accessible and inclusive, and the brand reflects this,” says This Way Up’s Chris White. “Accessibility and inclusivity have been the building blocks of creating a brand experience – both in real life and online – that welcomes our agile home heroes fully into the fold.”

The designs were initially rolled out in the US, and Europe and are currently stocked in Sainsburys and Asda in the UK.