Roast & Ritual
Crafting M&S’s new speciality coffee brand
The Challenge: Create an M&S speciality coffee brand with artisanal credentials, serious stand-out and timeless appeal.
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Our challenge: create an M&S speciality coffee brand with artisanal credentials, serious stand-out and timeless appeal. Marks & Spencer approached us with a new speciality coffee blend to launch in Café and Foodhall. Our challenge was to dial up M&S’s coffee credentials and turn it into a destination for speciality coffee – all without overshadowing M&S’s established premium ‘Collection’ line. Challenge accepted.
Our approach:
artisanal for everyone
​Our brand identity development process for Roast & Ritual involved three important steps…
1. Researching what really matters to coffee lovers
We explored how the M&S tone could flex for ‘speciality coffee for all’ – while honouring M&S’s core identity. Then we packaged everything into comprehensive guidelines covering logo-usage, design and packaging, along with voice and messaging.
The solution: accessible quality with artisanal innovation.
Logo design: a clean and modern logo with the quietly confident strapline: For real coffee lovers. Paired with a “Crafted by M&S Food” lock-up to bring it into the brand family.
Visual identity: a duck egg colour palette – and a swirling pattern inspired by latte art – gave the brand a gentle but distinctive artisanal look.
Packaging and photography: we designed the packaging to highlight the quality of the coffee, dialling up M&S’s coffee credentials – this included both cups and reusable cups. The photography style was all about telling a story of deliciousness, versatility and accessibility – whether it’s coffee sipped in an M&S Café or at home.
Tone of voice: the verbal identity and messaging are confident and down-to-earth, with carefully placed moments of wit.
The results: an inclusive speciality coffee brand for anyone who wants an artisanal blend.
More people in M&S Café
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Roast & Ritual boosted customer engagement across M&S Cafés. People liked the elevated quality and trusted familiarity of this new house blend.
Reaching new audiences
By offering Roast & Ritual in more formats – beans, ground, and pods – we captured the attention of new audiences and got people excited about enjoying speciality coffee at home.
Coffee lovers loved it
The brand resonated with key audiences: they appreciated both the modern, trend-driven feel and the trusted M&S quality.
M&S said some nice things about our work:
“Really tasty quote from M&S goes here and makes the project look even better than you could imagine!”
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Client Name, Job Title, M&S Food