While a bakery is identified by the freshness of its breads, the aromas wafting out its doors, the flakiness of its pastries, and the softness of its cakes, a diligently designed bakery logo is a foreplay of the senses, whetting the appetite even before the tentalizing smells of freshly baked muffins and pies caress the nose, or the sight of enticing macaroons and decadently luxurious chocolate chiffon cakes ambush the eyes. If the logo designer has done the job right, a bakery logo can say something concrete about what lays beyond the doors. Leveraging the power of only a few words and images, a logo can seek to communicate the texture and taste of bakery products.
However, nobody knows more than us the hard work and efforts invested into designing a single bakery logo. The seemingly impossible design briefs, tiffs with the clients, incessant nights tossing and turning in bed, conjuring up miraculous ways to fit all the client’s requirements inside a delicious looking bakery logo that makes the patrons head over to your bakery in a trance. Everything from the selection of colors and icons, to your font choice can say a lot about your bakery. Which is why, we wanted to delve deep into some great logo designs of startups and see what juicy secrets lay behind their identity marks.
Beers Bakery is famous for offering bespoke cakes for all occasions. Guaranteeing unparalleled taste, presentation, uniqueness in cake designs, in addition to personal service and attentiveness for an enjoyable and hassle-free experience, is very crucial to them. Exquisite wedding cakes are another area they excel at.
The owner of Beers Bakery, Sam, wanted an elegant and clean icon based design that does justice to his cake shop, so that the message “Bespoke Cakes for Every Occasion” shines out with USPs. The client wanted a sleek look that represents their design specialty, something exquisite that balances out the bespoke nature of the bakery and equally important aspects of the service like personal touch and attentiveness. In addition, the letter “B” was to be at the heart of the logo.
The designer from Pugmarker chose the font Znikomit to exhibit elegance, simplicity, and sleekness. The color palette of the entire branding foray was also chosen diligently; pink to depict sweetness, nurturing, and warmth, white to exude efficiency and genuineness, and Turquoise blue to denote communication, harmony, and creativity. Golden ratio was employed to balance out the logo, which made the experience satisfying and complete.
The awesome Mother/Daughter duo Melinda and Naomi carved a niche for themselves in the boutique cupcake scene and made a decent name with a host of scrumptious products. However, they were exasperated of being dwarfed by companies with mammoth marketing budgets and killer branding, like Sprinkles. Being a formally trained pastry chef from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, Naomi wasn’t an ordinary hobbyist turned shop-owner. Her business was her greatest passion and she aspired for her brand to be as imposing as her baking.
In order to embody the gourmet quality of Chef Naomi’s work, designers at Works Progress executed a bolder type treatment that reminiscences classic artisan bakeries, budged the focus from “Cupcakery” to “My Delight Cupcakery,” and incorporated simple iconography to hint at the fact that My Delight creation is not just a cupcake, but edible poetry.
Sweet Royalty is a budding cheesecake bakery based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. As a company still in its infancy, the cheesecake bakery needed a full brand, which included the name HD design studios came up with. The owner of the bakery was looking to start off the business with a professional visual appearance and a string structure. In order to glean more information about the aspirations of the owner, the Design studio team asked them questions such as what makes their service/product different, and what their brand attributes, and mission are. These questions helped the designers come up with the name of the bakery, in addition to the tagline, “A new take on an old tradition.” The bakery wanted to be a name to contend with in the wedding cake industry, and this helped define their audience.
Now for the fun part! In order to make the bakery come across as professional, simple, and fun, the designers chose a simple text based logo, which allowed for greater creativity with the supporting elements. For the colors, basic cheesecake ingredients were kept in mind, such as blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, and the crust. The vibrancy of colors brings a creative element leveraged throughout the brand design.
In Brooklyn Operating a bakery business is not a piece of cake, as Mia’s owner can tell you. One should have a memorable bakery branding icon to stand out in the crowd. These hard-to please New Yorkers harbor high expectations of being impressed with the next fad in food (remember Cronut?). However, Mia’s team had no interest in keeping up with the Joneses and creating the next “it” confection. They wanted to bring back the classic, simple, and pure. After all, nothing could ever be more “Brooklyn” than that, since New Yorkers pride themselves on being more “original” than having the latest and the greatest.
The icon chosen by Works Progress for the logo of the company is reminiscent of the Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise, a time when Mia’s delectable pastries and treats would be coming to life. When you factor in the modern architectural type treatment, it’s a mark any proud New Yorker would happily flaunt with their morning coffee. From Print materials to signage, small touches throughout the bakery space were made to connect it to classic New York architecture, such as Copper accents including a “copper leaf” window design, Chalkboard menus conjuring hand-drawn architectural renderings, and Modern type designs hinting at classic NY deco.
Owned by Elise, Cream & Sugar is a baking business specializing in home-style treats and desserts. Their products loudly shout a good-old, grandma style baking- only better. Therefore, Visible Logic made sure that their logo had a back-to-basics, handmade sensibility to it. All their marketing collateral is also printed on Kraft paper to enhance their branding- an age old gimmick employed by craftspeople and the food industry for generations.
Baker and Entrepreneur Du Jour Jason Sigala was looking to open his bakery in Southern California, offering old-fashioned, top-notch, made from scratch American desserts. He wanted the branding for his bakery, which would be called Towne Bakery, to incorporate a decidedly mid-century East Coast look and feel. He commissioned the designer Tim Frame to create the brand identity for this foodie startup.
Sigala provided Frame with a visual audit of the competition, as well as a plethora of visual inspiration he garnered from traditional New York bakeries. Tim Frame pushed for a logo which had a unique shape incorporating the script type. The elliptical shape of the logo mimics the appearance of typical signage from the ’40s, complete with a script typeface that is a nod towards stylings consistent with that era, line work that resembles decorative icing, and a unique outline. The logo icon combines a unique shape, a banner, a simple pattern, and typography that convey quality and a sense of nostalgia. The pale blue color ended up being the final color of the logo, since it complemented the materials and colors used in the bakery, and blends in well with the nostalgic theme.
Roy Shvartzapel came to Base Design with an uncompromising, bold mission: to structure Common bond as the best bakery in America. His culinary éclat, earned after years working at some of the most elite restaurants such as Bouley, Balthazar, Pierre Hermé, and Bulli, piqued the interest of the designers at Base Design. However, his overarching philosophy was that world-class cuisine should be available to all and sundry.
The client wanted the bakery’s Houstonian roots to reflect in its brand’s personality; it had to be centered on Southern hospitality. But it was important that this be done with a contemporary twist, not in any way that hints at nostalgia. The name developed by Base Design, Common Bond, echoes the shared vision of the café’s partners that finest food should be accessible to all, as can be seen from the tagline, “Only for all.” A circular lockup was decided upon for the logo icon to reference the most egalitarian way of seating; a round table. The package design and identity further amplified the quality, modernity, and simplicity that lay at the core of the brand.
The logo design by Adelphi Digital is Asian to the core, with intricate Chinese characters coming together to form the word Tiong Bahru. The unique shape of the logo conjures up images of a baguette, informing the customer of its proposition. A clean san-serif type, League Gothic, is used for the simple wordmark “Tiong Bahru Bakery.” The choice of the name itself suggests an exotic Asian chic to the foreigners seeking out gourmet bread, while being instantly familiar to the local Singaporean foodies on the lookout for yet another indie cafe with a distinctive feel. Incorporating the stamp of Gontran Cherrie, the famous French Boulanger, in a classy yet casual font imbues the brand with a sense of credibility and authenticity. This is a winner logo that enraptures patrons even before they take a bite off the bread.
Panera Breads is a renowned chain of bakery-café restaurants in Canada and the United States, specializing in organic foods, bakery items, soups, sandwiches, breads, and even pizza in limited locations. Panera is rather thought of as a “fast casual” restaurant. The logo mark of Panera bread ingeniously depicts the illustration of a woman with flowing locks, clutching a bread loaf in her arm. The logomark perfectly echoes the slogan of the company, “A loaf of bread in every arm”. Heckler Associates developed the logo and the entire branding for the new company, and they have interesting stories to tell when it comes to how “the St. Loius Bread Company” was rebranded to “Panera Bread”.
They call the lady in the logomark, the “mother Bread”. This is because the process of making sourdough bread entails adding a small piece of the dough from the previous batch. In bakery jargon, this starter piece is deemed the Mother! Each time Panera opens stores in a new region, the artisans lovingly carry over a piece of the original starter created in the 1980s to the new bakery to make sure that the original Panera character and quality rises again and again.
The Adelaide-based bakery, Happy Maple, is focused entirely on creating peanut and tree nut free recipes, and baked not fried, small batch 100% vegan donuts. Customers put in their orders via pop-up stores, Email, or phone. Instead of a viable website, they had a strong social media presence replete with donut images galore, a cheerful brand identity, and a personable approach to communication; all designed by the local graphic design studio Gerbett Design.
Garbett Design has ingeniously leveraged the ubiquitous form of a donut and acquaintance with its various toppings, and managed to visually articulate the personable and jovial tone of voice that customers had come to associate with the social media presence of Happy Maple, and the modernity and inclusivity of a completely “free-from” concept. All this was achieved by designing a simple logo concept- a half-eaten donut with falling out crumbs, forming a smiling face-, a contemporary color palette, and attractive yet straightforward photography and illustration, rampant across its branding.
The design studio Dot Dash worked hand in hand with the founder of Fatties, Chloe Timme, to create the identity and name for this newly opened confectionery/bakery. Fatties started out by selling its treats from a small bakery located at the back of Broadway Market, and soon expanded to Pinch Pantry and LA Bouche. Fatties’ products run the gamut from coconut flour brownies, to bags of passion fruit sherbet with pineapple lollipops, and treats such as pistachio and cardamom caramels.
The name and design of the bakery were created concurrently with the idea of juxtaposing the implications of the name with a chic, clean design. This was successfully achieved by a texture/pattern evoking the floured surfaces prevalent across bakeries, combined with a modern color scheme and playful stretching of the letters in the logo. The overall objective was to create a modern, playful, and luxurious identity.
Following a takeover by the new owners, the task of creating a new brand identity and logo for Loughran’s Bakery fell into the hands of agency Kumo Ink. The owner of the bakery aspired to revamp the company branding and logo to something modern, while also retaining their rich business legacy with a slightly rustic feel. This is exactly what the logo articulates.
The awe-inspiring fact that Elina’s bakery is coordinated by only one person from a personal home space, played a major role in the creative process of designing a logo for the bakery. While the logo design should embody an ambition and a vision, according to the requirements of the bakery owner, it should be capable of maintaining its original values in case Elina’s bakery develops. Another requirement by the client was that the logo shouldn’t only target their cupcakes for which the bakery is famous, but the complete range of its products.
The logo identity by The Birthday Design is an amalgamation of all the client requirements, and captures the design brief in the illustration of a home oven with a roof. The recognizable home oven with the glass and buttons of the façade is the most recognizable feature of the logo. Soft Contour and rounded corners of the home oven make the logo appear friendlier, and blend in well with the soft rounded letters. In order to exude immediacy and friendliness, all small case letters are used for the wordmark.
Established in 1989 by pastry chef Nancy Silverton in a single storefront on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, CA, La Brea Bakery is now one of the leading producers of “partially baked artisan breads in the U.S., supplied to food stores and restaurants throughout the world.” It also maintains two teeming cafes. Its previous logo, created by its employees, had a great story to tell but its folk charm was starting to seem more whimsical than artisan. They collaborated with Hornall Anderson to revamp the logo concept, as long as their beloved “B” was at its core.
The passion of the people at La Brea bakery and their love for great bread is what inspired the designers and helped them come up with a solution for the identity; this discovery resulted in a memorable, iconic, and simple design. At first, people only see the lower case “b” when they look at the logo. Then, a smile crawls across their lips when they discover the hidden loaf of bread- the heart of the company- at the center of the “b”. In addition, the use of a serif is a nice respite from sanseses. The supporting typography makes the yeast rise right up to the top.
Brown’s Court Bakery, located in an 1800s Charleston-style home, is the only structure still standing of four “sister” houses, originally called as ‘Brown’s Court’. In an attempt to reflect the unique blend of the bakery’s modern and historical charms, Studionudge created a custom-lettered logo mark and a brand identity that extended from signage and menu to a responsive website.
DaisyMoon Bakery is a bespoke, gluten free bakery located in Morgantown, WV. The bakery’s founder asked for a website and a brand concept that resonated with the bakery’s nature-loving and whimsical roots. Limonata Creative developed a logo concept that mimicked a beaming full moon enveloped by beautifully rendered budding daisies. They also designed a stunning website that stays true to the owner’s design priorities, such as the desired color scheme, ease of navigation, aesthetic appeal, and simplicity. Limonata personally met with the owner of DaisyMoon bakery to share photography and prop-styling tips that resulted in capturing the cake image currently flaunted on the website’s opening banner. In addition, the creative and versatile logo concept of the bakery can be applied across a wide array of branding and marketing materials. Their website also has an easy going and polished look that their customers can easily warm up to.
Can you think of more scrumptious bakery logos with fascinating stories trailing behind them? Do let us know in the comments below.
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