Friendly Food- yum!

This summer I was asked to design a food label for Healthy Peninsula, a non-profit group that works to improve the health of the community in the Blue Hill peninsula and Deer Isle/Stonington area. This year they received a grant to work specifically with the community of Sedgwick to improve their eating habits. A lot of this work focuses on the school where there is a new serious greenhouse and cooking lessons for kids.

The goal of the "friendly foods" label is to create a recognizable symbol to mark foods that are healthy. Ideally this "logo" will be used in the school cafeteria, on recipes, and at food pantries, grocery stores and convenience stores. The tricky part is that the word "healthy" in the minds of the target audience possibly equals expensive, unappetizing, crunchy, pretentious, etc. So the solution was to use the word "friendly". This especially made sense because the biggest audience is the children at the elementary school. The hope is that these kids will learn to love the foods they cook and eat at school and that they will then encourage their parents to get the "friendly foods" at the store. This sounds a bit challenging, but I think it's a truly great idea and I'm very glad I'm involved.

The first use of the new resource came in October when stickers were made to put on root vegetable goodie bags given out at an event.

So this summer in the midst of carousing with friends and planning my mom's wedding I managed to come up with some concepts that eventually resulted in the following logos. The original word page was contributed by many people on various watercraft and pond-side locale. Note the varied writing media throughout the pages including a brown (?) magic marker. A big difficulty in coming up with plausible designs was that it couldn't really include any specific food or make reference even to vegetation (so tempting) since it could be used on meals and recipes and not just ingredients. The final design is friendly and approachable, but I hope also clean and beneficial.