Client and the challenge

Rethink Food is a chef-led non-profit that connects restaurants with community organizations to deliver nutritious, high-quality, dignified meals where they're needed most. 34 million meals have been distributed since 2017.

They approached us to build a website that clearly articulated their narrative, showcased the breadth of their programs and impact, and amplified their advocacy work. Rethink Food already had a strong brand foundation and needed the right incarnation of it online.

Approach

This non-profit is chef-led, and we wanted to make it as clear as possible. It started from a real action of creating a community kitchen and scaled from the ground up. We wanted to demonstrate the tension that can be found at the intersection of the non-profit and restaurant worlds.

The high-quality, energetic, confident food shots address the chef background. The behind-the-scenes footage grounds it in grassroots reality. And the street style is delivered by bending the safety margins: allowing text to approach the borders, with safe margins, sometimes, completely absent.

Typography and color

We used one font for everything — Styrene A by Commercial Type. This restriction allowed us to demonstrate the organization's no-nonsense attitude whilst creating a space for experimentation with sizes, weights, highlights, and layouts. We reduced the use of green and introduced more high-contrast black and white to help deliver more confidence and seriousness to match the severity of the mission: feeding millions of people reliably.

Website build

We deliberately limited customization to allow the client to independently manage and grow their website. We therefore focused on adjusting the styling of Squarespace's margins, paddings, and highlighting. 

One area where we did apply necessary custom code is the multimedia. First, we injected movement into the homepage by placing three autoplay videos side by side: they lead to three directions of Rethink Food's work. Second, we customized a special behavior for the full bleed videos: they play automatically silently, but there's a play button that starts them from the beginning and with the sound. This way the storytelling isn't missed. The feature is built so the team can reuse it without any custom code.