ZBD bars are CBD infused nutrition bars, made with high quality food—and they needed high quality branding. A nutrition company with an existing product line—Zing Bar saw an opportunity to expand its knowledge of high quality health bars into the CBD food sector. Zing engaged TANKindustries to partner on the creation of its line extension.

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DISCOVERY

 

Whether its for food, corporate identity, or a retail store—our branding process begins with stakeholder conversations. Executives, trade, employees, sometimes investors, and most importantly consumers.

 

For ZBD, our conversations took us into discussions about CBD distillation processes, the science of CBD absorption into the circulatory system, colors and language used throughout CBD food sector, form factors and materials used in packaging. A nice balance of science and art.

 

After analyzing our conversations and collected research, the surprise for us was that trade and consumers are OK with packaging that doesn’t reveal the actual product, they resonate with imagery of ingredients—Produced to look fun, yet palatable, and they don’t want information shoved down their throats: “we understand the basics, anything else we can learn on our own.”

 

This data lead us to produce a minimal aesthetic, allowing lots of room to focus on fun engaging photography of ingredients, obvious branding, and only the most important product details.

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LOGO

 

 

The identity process with the ZBD team, was a unique one for TANKindustries. The executive team requested a collaborative process—working closely with us to choose typefaces and color palettes, during the initial design phases. While these early phases of work are normally internal, we created a series of virtual working sessions for this collab.

 

The process was rewarding for both sides. Changing a set of early transactional decisions, into an intimate experience for both the TANKindustries design team

and the ZBD executive team.

 

Together, sifting through hundreds of typefaces, loads of color palettes, and data from our Discovery, the outcome was an extensible design that embraces the

most important parts of ZBD’s brand core: the role and brand attributes.

 

If you are designer, you might be saying, “That sounds awful! Who brings a client into this phase of work?” If you are an organization, you might be saying, “That actually sounds like something we’d benefit from.” Part of our ethos is looking for hidden ingredients—maybe even a surprise—and this felt like a good way to get there.