Graphic design agency Koto brand France's first food delivery service, Taster

London design studio Koto is known for its ability to capture the very essence of a brand into minimal, on-point branding — including the rebrand for gumtree. Their latest project sees Koto complete the full branding identity for France’s first food delivery service, Taster, based in Paris.

We caught a minute with Koto to find a bit about the project and their branding process. Tongues at the ready.

How did you go about approaching the branding for the delivery service?

Anton the CEO used to work at Deliveroo and had seen the growing want for a wide offer of takeaway, with options that weren’t always unhealthy treats. Living in a large city like Paris there are a lot of situations take away suits. On your own watching TV, socialising with friends, at work. Taster has a series of kitchens all over Paris which serve the three brands they offer right now. The Koto team spent time with them in their head office and the kitchens and it’s amazing how having the single focus of takeaway makes the food fly out.

How did you suit it to the French audience – was this a key consideration?

We’ve built a brand with a European audience in mind. From name to visual brand it was important this was something that appealed to a broad audience. Young urban dwellers are exposed to and respond to global brands instinctively and as such we see Taster as a global food brand.

Can you tell us a bit about your process with the design?

We worked with the team to build out a robust brand strategy around the idea of “make every meal special”. With this in place and a good sense of how Taster as a meta-brand relates to the companies various food brands, we went after a catchy name and simple universal icon to build the brand around.

Taster and the tongue just worked, and having settled upon these the effort was in getting the ‘T’ Tongue to work at all scales across everything from merchandise to signage. It’s got an obvious nod to emojis, without feeling like an emoji itself. We liked the idea in the long run of people being able to ask each other if they fancied a Taster with one simple key stroke. The team have got big plans and it was important we built a flexible brand for wherever the brand takes them.