Honest Crust. Food for thoughtful
Welcome to Honest Crust, the new food to go brand created using Gorilla Tactics, our Challenger thinking inspired process designed to help accelerate growth.
Honest Crust is a brand with a purpose that in a matter of weeks from launch has started to elevate it over and above it’s direct competitors.
By pursuing this strategic path with commitment and honesty, we predict Honest Crust will outperform the market and over deliver the brand’s expectations. It’s already on its way to a brand value approaching £8m.
Honest Crust is a range of 40+ food to go products: sandwiches, wraps, salads, rolls, pasta pots, hot boxes and toasties. The UK food to go market is worth £18bn annually and dominated by supermarkets and high street chains.
Taking a bite out of that was never going to be achieved by simply following and emulating the market leaders.
By being aware of the category conventions we chose to ignore them and looked elsewhere for inspiration. Honest Crust is built on principles of challenger brand thinking so we stopped thinking about what made the product great and started thinking about how it could matter. Those beliefs are now being shared with conviction.
Honest Crust isn’t just about making great food, that’s a given. It’s a brand with an agenda and a platform, using its scale and reach to work against the rise in food poverty and help tackle food waste.
It’s a committed start, providing 200k free meals through partnering with FareShare in the first year. Next year the ambition will be bigger.
This narrow but focused purpose comes with added benefits. Challenger thinking promotes imaginative solutions to communicating brand messages, and knowing why you’re here only makes the clarity of the communication easier.
In year one Honest Crust has committed to provide 200,000 meals through FareShare to those who need them most.
Honest Crust x FareShare
FareShare do an amazing job. They take fresh, in date and good to eat surplus food from the food industry and redistribute it to charities that turn it into meals. Last year they managed 16,992 tonnes of it.
By teaming up with FareShare, Honest Crust is building on an already closely held desire to reduce food waste and have a positive impact on food poverty. The unused crusts have long since been used to brew beer. To read more about another challenger brand that does that, see www.toastale.com
Behind the core strategic mission of giving, Honest Crust encourages people to get involved in giving three ways. The brands owners, its employees, suppliers and partners are all encouraged to contribute to the cause through donating money, donating food and or donating time.
Ape’s approach and use of challenger brand thinking and principles gives me a different way of looking at the market and the opportunity. It needs faith and trust but together, working genuinely collaboratively, we’ve had a successful launch into a very competitive market.
Alastair Johns
Brand Development Manager
Honest Crust
The proof of the pudding is in the execution of the thinking.
Just weeks from launch and Honest Crust has won multiple new supply agreements and is growing at an accelerated rate.
Why? They’re a good, maybe even great products and similarly priced to the competition too. But that alone would not have been enough to achieve this degree of success so early on.
Honest Crust have challenged their category, they’ve not reinvented the sandwich. But given the choices what brand would you stock, what brand would you consume?
One that offers you an alternative and a meaningful opportunity to do something good? Or the competitor options, you know, the generic ones just across the shelf, they’re probably brightly coloured, shouting loudly about how great they taste and how fresh they are. Sounds familiar, bit uninspiring, sounds destined to under-deliver to us.
So bin the belief that what my product does is somehow different to everyone else and discover why your brand inspires. Then employ some challenger thinking and uncover how your brand can be the success story it deserves it be.
Get a new perspective and find the challenge in your brand.