Bretzel Bakery
Real Bread
Made Well
For over 150 years, Bretzel Bakery has been a pillar of Dublin’s Portobello community, serving generations with honest, wholesome sourdough and sustaining the cultural fabric of its locals. Now, as their products reach further across Ireland through national partnerships and acquisitions, the challenge became clear. How do you grow the brand without losing what makes it special?
This is a business that has evolved into a vital B2B player helping the world’s leading food, beverage and pharma brands reformulate, innovate and create better products at scale. Products that balance taste, nutrition, functionality and sustainability. Kerry understands better than most that brand is not decoration – it’s signal and strategy, and in times of transformation, it must evolve too.
This is where we stepped in. As long-standing brand partners, we worked alongside Kerry to strategically recalibrate its Masterbrand so it truly reflects who the business is today and the future it is shaping.
The Challenge
Kerry is not a consumer brand. It operates behind the scenes; co-creating,
reimagining and enabling thousands of products that are enjoyed by over a billion people each year. Since launching its Masterbrand in 2019 and Beyond the Horizon strategy in 2020, the business has fundamentally redefined what it is and what does.
Through portfolio reshaping, divestments and sustained investment in R&D, Kerry has become laser-focused on high-value B2B solutions across taste, biotechnology, proactive health, food protection and preservation. It now operates as a true systems integrator, blending world-class science, data, application expertise and serious scale to solve some of the food system’s most complex challenges.
While the Masterbrand was strong, it had not fully kept pace with this shift. It needed to move beyond signalling purpose and clearly express Kerry’s role as a science-driven partner helping customers move faster from concept to launch – while navigating regulation, reformulation, nutrition goals and sustainability demands. It needed to:
· Reflect Kerry’s transformation into a pure-play taste and nutrition platform
· Clearly articulate its science-led, solutions-based value proposition
· Flex naturally across markets, categories and audiences while remaining unmistakably Kerry
· Inspire and support ambition at scale, both within the business and out in the world
· And crucially, position Kerry to achieve its core vision – to create a world of sustainable nutrition.
The Future of Sustainable Nutrition
Kerry’s ambition is bold: to reach more than two billion people with sustainable nutrition by 2030. This is not a marketing line. It is the organising principle and lifeblood of the business. It shapes what Kerry builds, where it invests, and how it shows up for customers around the world.
Kerry operates where taste, nutrition and sustainability meet. It helps global brands reduce sugar, salt and fat, introduce functional and fortified nutrition, develop plant-based and alternative protein solutions, and improve efficiency and environmental performance, all without sacrificing the sensory experience people love. It brings together flavours, enzymes, cultures, proteins data and deep application expertise, weaving them into solutions that are scalable, regulatory-ready and built for the real world.
The Solution
With a strong foundation already in place, we focused on unlocking the Masterbrand’s full potential rather than reinventing it. We delved into a deep discovery process combining audits, strategic workshopping and close collaboration with the core Kerry team to understand how the business had shifted and where the brand needed to stretch. The result is a more expansive, expressive and future-ready brand system. One that gives Kerry the clarity, confidence and creative heft to show up with authority and energy everywhere it meets the world.
Key evolved elements included:
A Sharpened Value Proposition
We reframed Kerry’s role as that of a science-led, customer-centric partner – not a supplier of ingredients, but a collaborator in solving complex food and nutrition challenges.
An Unstoppable Positioning Statement
Kerry’s ambition was distilled into a clear, compelling shorthand: ‘The Future of Sustainable Nutrition’ More than a line, it is a north star – signalling that sustainable nutrition is not a destination, but a continuous pursuit, powered by science, innovation and true partnership.
A Warmer, More Approachable and Authoritative Tone of Voice
The words Kerry use and the tone it strikes are among the most powerful ways the brand earns trust and builds belief. Our Brand Voice team set out to warm up Kerry’s voice in a way that felt true to who they are – moving beyond corporate formality and technical density towards something more editorial, expressive, provocative and relatable. A voice that draws people in, brings science to life and places real-world impact at the heart of every story.
A Unifying Storytelling Framework
Tone of voice defines how a brand speaks, but a storytelling framework gives shape to what it says. To help teams bring brand messages to life across markets, categories and cultures, we created a simple four-step framework that offers a shared way to structure every story. A pattern that leads with impact, makes Kerry’s unparallelled value clear, and connects science-led innovation to the outcomes it creates in the real world.
A More Expressive Visual System
Building on Kerry’s existing identity, we expanded the visual system to unlock greater vibrancy, versatility and impact. Colour palettes were evolved and refined to have more visual punch and energy. Typographic styling was expanded to reflect our updated tone of voice. While Noto Sans remained the primary typeface we added a condensed all caps weight to highlight real impact and a monospaced font to highlight the empirical scientific content and moments of proof.
Our visual world is now bolder and more immersive too. Photography is amped up and more cinematic – capturing real-world enjoyment and those epic moments of making, tasting and transforming. We’ve leant into the beauty of science itself, zooming in to a molecular level to reveal the precision and wonder behind the work. Microshapes have been created to denote the microscopic building blocks behind all of the scientific breakthroughs and as visual markers of impact.
Together, these visual elements breathe new life into the brand system – pushing everything a little further to ensure that Kerry is seen not just for what it makes, but for what it makes possible.
The Impact
Today, Kerry has a brand that matches the scale of its thinking and the reach of its ambition. The evolved Masterbrand gives Kerry the presence to speak with authority, the consistency to be recognised wherever it shows up, and the credibility to be trusted as a long-term partner in innovation.
More than a system of words and visuals, the brand has become a force inside the organisation, aligning teams, sharpening focus and giving shared shape to a bold idea: that better food, better health and a lighter footprint on the planet can co-exist and grow together. And that, as we see it, is real impact…
