— Diego Raso, Vice President, Marketing & Brand Management at Sodexo
Context
From cultural values to religious beliefs, and sporting teams in between, every college student is as different as what they eat. For university administrators — each operating as independent units — the dining hall needs to feed over one million people every day. Already serving 350 colleges across the US, Sodexo needed a unified brand to bring multiple stakeholders together and scale a growing, billion-dollar food business.
On a US road trip, Without developed a strategy based on the seemingly impossible: finding consensus in diversity by making difference the commonality. One campus, thousands of students. One dining hall, something for everyone. One company, a team of many. One purpose, for the good of all. The result was One&All, a brand built on fix and flex. From global dishes with full dietary transparency and customization options, to places for every vibe and student-driven initiatives, One&All creates spaces where you don’t just dine, but belong.
Early site visits in New York and Pennsylvania
DEFINE AND DESIGN
Without’s collegiate visual identity was built from a modern take on varsity-style design cues. We took the concept of a college mascot to create two dining hall hosts: the illustrated characters of “One” and “All”, shaped by the letters O and A. One’s a vegan, All is into carnivore ‘teins. One needs caffeine, All’s in training. With their very different personalities, the pair were perfect for fronting our ideas for merch, including T-shirts, hoodies, caps, tote bags and mugs.
We created an ownable colour palette of rhubarb pink that cuts through the breadth of the colleges (no college has pink as its core colour), with a supporting cast of secondary shades to flex the identity for different universities and give a faded, nostalgic feel. A striped background combines the visual language of team sports strips with deli/food spaces.
Varsity-style typography blends the big and bold with a script-style typeface for character and diversity and a modern-retro vibe, while a positive slogan-style tone of voice fosters a team ethos and collective mindset.
Bringing some humanity into the identity with grown-up playfulness
DELIVER
One of our most systematized projects, we worked alongside internal teams and external suppliers to deliver one market proposition with universal appeal. We created a comprehensive identity system and brand guidelines that can be fixed and flexed to work for an operational chain of command that stretches from global headquarters, to diverse university campuses, to individual site managers and teams, each operating as independent units with a common goal. Without developed supporting toolkits for each application, including signage, uniforms, sales deck, social media, menus and merchandise.
Speaking of which… the challenge from Sodexo was for every student to covet the merch because the brand becomes so central to their campus experience. Watch this space.
A peak into our identity system and brand guidelines