The Brand and the Business
Community Table Kitchen is a social enterprise owned and operated by Bridge House, a Boulder, CO nonprofit. Their mission is to transition the homeless by providing case management, housing and paid employment through Community Table Kitchen. CTK is a working commercial kitchen where trainees of the program are readied for the culinary industry through instruction and mentoring, becoming employable in the community upon graduation of the program. CTK offers full service catering, daily take and bake meals for busy locals and an e-commerce confections brand. In addition, CTK runs a cafe in Foothills Hospital, Boulder’s premier medical center. While the kitchen strives to grow a self-sustainable business, they also provide daily meals to the food insecure of Boulder. This spec project focused on re-envisioning their brand, and digitally transforming aspects of their business.
Opportunity
CTK does a lot. In 2021 it cooked a 180k+ meals, feeding trainees living at the Bridge House dorm, providing daily meals to the at-risk still on the street, catering diverse events for businesses and private affairs like weddings, and baking 130k+ brownies for a Bridge House owned confections brand. The kitchen's volume of production is staggering really, and the work skills gained by the kitchen trainees is incredible. This said, as the bulk of CTK's efforts serve its parent, Bridge House, the CTK brand seemed pretty inward facing.
While its achievements are well known in the NFP world, CTK's brand awareness with Boulder's consumers is low. CTK's take and bake business seems like a huge opportunity to solve this problem. It produces a dinner menu Boulderites can order and pick up on the run. It is small in comparison, with only 1700+ meals produced in 2021. This public facing product line offers the ability to build something unique that could elevate CTK's brand visibility, promote their story and generate additional revenues that can serve the homeless.
Problem Identification and Strategy
To enhance the take and bake business, CTK needed to be unshackled from Bridge House and emphasize some independence. The CTK brand identity is cobranded with Bridge House, existing as a logotype with the Bridge House BH logomark. It also shares the same color system (black & neon green), which feels a bit gamer, rather than food and dining. Further, as the take and bake menu offering is buried in the Bridge House website architecture, finding it online is difficult.
Lastly, the meal ordering and purchasing flow is antiquated and cumbersome as a user experience. My end solution involved rebranding CTK, taking some creative license with what a new menu might look like, and building a separate mobile application that lets CTK stand apart, with the hope that "Take n' Bake" takes on its own identity, public facing, while promoting CTK and Bridge House's mission.