There’s long been talk around the UK’s penchant for ultra-processed junk food, with increasing concerns around how the marketing of these types of foods is often heavily targeted towards children. For instance, research by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in 2019 found that “children in the UK see over 15 billion adverts for food and drink products that are high in fat, sugar and salt online”.

To fight against this, Bite Back, a youth activist movement co-founded by Jamie Oliver in 2019, intends to challenge “a food system that’s been set up to fool us all”, and call out the “junk food giants”. With a youth board of over 70 activists, over the last four years Bite Back has helped push the UK government to extend free school meals during lockdown, as well as continually helping local schools, businesses and councils create grassroots impact.

With lots of work still to be done, Bite Back has taken the opportunity to reiterate its mission and show people who they are with a rebrand. Working with Wolff Olins, the new identity is inspired by “brandalism, the subversion of marketing and critique of corporate control”.

“We want to help people have a bit of a ‘penny drop moment’ and realise that they’re surrounded by a flood of junk every day,” explains Wolff Olins associate creative director, Joe Waterfield. “So we’ve taken the incredibly common typefaces, colours and even highly saturated photography styles you find in so much food marketing, stuck it all in a blender, and put it in the hands of young people as a tool for progress.”

The rebrand has an updated colour palette inspired by junk food marketing adopting hues such as ‘Chicken Shop Red’, ‘Deep-Fried Yellow’ and ‘Unlicensed Mauve’. The typography used follows suit featuring fonts like ‘Fried Serif’, ‘Sugar Rush Round’ and ‘Cereal Script’.

The refreshed Bite Back logo features a “towering mouth” to highlight the brand is “ready to speak up and bite back against the flood of unhealthy food”. To help bring everything to life, Wolff Olins has also worked with animation studio Animade to create a series of mouth expressions and animations to allow the brand to talk to its many audiences.

A central part of the identity is also Bite Back’s tone of voice which plays with the language of food and calling out junk food marketers with phrases and terms such as ‘Cereal Offenders’ and ‘Fuel us, don’t fool us’.

The approach was inspired by the network’s activists. “Bite Back’s network is full of witty, funny, whipsmart young people who are hungry to make a change. The brand’s new voice bottles that wit and uses it to cut through all the crap people are fed every day,” says David Stevens, executive strategy director at Wolff Olins.

wolffolins.com