Overview
Essential uses fermentation to produce affordable, high-quality, climate-resilient protein. It's made in their own biomanufacturing facility in Nairobi and sold as a B2B ingredient to food manufacturers, school feeding programmes and humanitarian partners across Sub-Saharan Africa.
It's a story with many layers: microbes and bioreactors on one side, malnutrition and climate resilience on the other. And it has to land with very different audiences, from food companies evaluating an ingredient, to NGOs and governments planning nutrition programmes, to funders deciding whether to back a new kind of bioscience company.
The challenge was holding the balance. Lean too far into the science and the brand reads like a lab report. Lean too far into the mission and it reads like a charity appeal. Essential needed to be both, consistently, everywhere it shows up.
Process
As Essential's embedded creative partner, I work across the whole brand, from visual language to the everyday tools the team uses to communicate.
Brand foundation. Building on Essential's strong strategic core, I shaped a restrained visual system: one typeface in a single light weight, a deliberately small palette with pink reserved for key numbers, and photography of real people, real food and real facilities. The human and the technical, often in the same frame.
Website. From narrative and information architecture to design, build and launch in Framer. The site walks each audience through the product, the R&D platform and the impact, with a buyer-ready product page, gated research downloads and an SEO foundation built in.
Reports. Editorial design and formatting for long-form and policy output, built to the publication standards of institutional partners. Clear structure and hierarchy make dense research easy to navigate.
Decks & AI-ready tools. A master PowerPoint built as a full design system with layout families, plus the key decks for investors, funders and partners. Branded Office and Google templates are paired with custom Claude skills that encode the brand rules, so the team can draft, check and clean up documents on their own, without a designer in the loop.
Result
The Essential brand holds its balance from bioreactor to bowl of porridge, and the systems behind it let the team keep it that way on their own.
For me, this is the kind of partnership I value most: a mission that matters, a founder who treats design as part of the strategy, and the room to build lasting capability alongside the work itself.
12
months of ongoing creative partnership
1
impact-driven website speaking to buyers, partners and funders
30+
decks, reports, templates and web pages delivered
