From farm to shelf. Strategy to artwork.

The challenge

Vision Greens grows leafy greens at scale inside climate-controlled vertical farms outside Toronto — a technology story, an agricultural story, and a retail story at once. None of those stories were reading.

The existing brand was competent but quiet. On a Loblaws shelf next to incumbents with decades of trade equity, quiet loses. The product was ready. The packaging was not. The site was a placeholder. The identity did not give the sales team anything to carry into a buyer meeting.

Three things had to happen in parallel: an identity that could hold across a farm, a box, and a carousel ad; a three-SKU packaging line that actually won attention on shelf; and a commerce site that respected the margin economics of fresh produce.

The approach

We ran the engagement in three tracks that fed each other instead of waiting in sequence.

• Positioning first. Two weeks of retail walks, buyer conversations, and a short competitive audit. The finding was simple: the category was over-indexed on “local.” Local was table stakes. The differentiator was the farm itself — visible, year-round, consistent. We positioned Vision Greens as farm-forward, not farm-adjacent.
• Identity built for production. Wordmark, palette, and pack language designed against real substrates and real print constraints. The serif wordmark is intentionally warm; the system around it is agricultural and spare. Every asset was built with a production-ready version on day one.
• Three-SKU packaging line. Crunchy, Zesty, and Fancy — a naming system that reads across categories and creates a family the buyer can expand into. Each carton was designed to hold its own face-out and to stack into a block on shelf.
• Commerce site. A DTC surface that does not pretend to be a supermarket. Product, farm, story, basket. Written to support retail rather than fight it.

The outcome

The identity shipped into retail artwork and pitch-level pitch decks in under a quarter. The carton system stood up in-store without defence. The digital surface runs at a fraction of the cost of the category average because the content system was designed before the CMS was chosen.

Most importantly, the brand did the work the product had already done. The sales team stopped apologising for the old deck. The buyer meeting changed shape. The conversation about shelf moved from “who are you” to “how many facings.”

Vision Greens remains an in-flight engagement. Further rollout — in-store material, campaign, and category expansion — is ongoing.