Ready-to-heat meal service rebrand shows off colourful, distinctive personality

Australian frozen meal company The Dinner Ladies teamed up with design studio Universal Favourite and illustrator Jake Foreman to create a modernised brand. The hope is the updated identity will reflect the brand's growth while still paying homage to its legacy.

The Dinner Ladies is a ready-to-heat meal service based in Sydney. Having been operating since 2007, the company felt its identity had become diluted over the years, so wanted its imagery and branding to be revitalised. 

Its tattoo-esque heart logo needed to be redefined. This was achieved by Universal Favourite decoupling the heart and wordmark, thereby improving legibility. The studio then teamed up with Jack Foreman to redraw the brand's illustrations.

The brand's iconic red was modernised with the addition of a secondary colour palette, adding warm, retro hues. Elsewhere, The Dinner Ladies' new brand photography mimics the messiness of dinnertime in reality. Adopting quirky styling choices, the pictures pop with chaos and colour. 

Hoping to be an attention-grabbing hero element for the brand, confident yet practical typeface ‘Denim’ matches The Dinner Ladies' punk, confident aesthetic.

The new identity is encapsulated in the tagline “Heat Up. Feet Up. Eat Up” which reinstates the brand's purpose as a no prep meal delivery service.