The Salad Project Logo Refresh Makes Healthy Food Look Less Like A Prescription

Healthy food branding has spent years looking suspiciously similar.

White backgrounds.

Perfectly arranged ingredients.

A lot of green.

Add a clean sans-serif logo, photograph an avocado from directly above and the job is almost done.

The formula made sense for a while. It told customers that everything was fresh, controlled and probably good for them. The problem is that when an entire category starts speaking the same visual language, nobody sounds particularly distinctive anymore.

The Salad Project is moving away from that world.

The London fast-casual brand has introduced a broad visual refresh developed with Unfound Studio, alongside a new digital flagship designed to support its next stage of international growth. With expansion beyond the UK and flagship locations planned for Paris, the company isn’t simply polishing the identity it already had.

It’s trying to make healthy food feel a little less clinical.

That’s a surprisingly useful distinction.

For years, many salad bars and wellness-focused restaurants borrowed visual cues from pharmacies, laboratories and technology companies. Everything was bright, spotless and extremely organized. The food might have been colorful, but the branding around it often wasn’t.

The Salad Project’s new direction feels noticeably warmer.

Photography plays a big part in that shift. Instead of treating every bowl like a product specimen, the refreshed identity brings more of the restaurant into the frame. Hands preparing ingredients, movement behind the counter, imperfect arrangements and the natural messiness of actual food service replace the polished still-life approach that has become almost unavoidable across delivery apps.

The difference is immediate.

Food looks like food again.

The color palette moves in the same direction. Rather than depending on predictable bright greens and sterile whites to communicate freshness, the identity introduces softer, earthier tones inspired by ingredients, natural materials and tableware. The result sits somewhere closer to a neighborhood café than a health-food laboratory.

That’s probably intentional.

The typography loosens up too.

Rigid geometric lettering can make almost anything look efficient, which is useful when you’re selling software or banking services. Food needs something else. The Salad Project’s refreshed type system introduces more expressive shapes and a slightly handmade quality, giving the brand enough irregularity to feel human without becoming rustic.

It’s a difficult balance.

Too polished and the restaurant starts looking like an app that happens to sell lunch.

Too handmade and a growing international chain can begin feeling artificial in a completely different way.

The Salad Project is trying to sit somewhere in between.

That challenge will become more important as the company expands. A handful of London restaurants can build personality through interiors, employees and regular customers. A brand entering new cities needs that personality to travel without turning every location into an identical copy.

That’s where the new digital flagship becomes more interesting than a standard website redesign.

The platform isn’t being treated simply as a menu with a checkout button attached. It’s designed to change around different locations, available ingredients and customer preferences, allowing the same overall brand to behave slightly differently from city to city.

Paris doesn’t necessarily need to feel exactly like London.

The identity needs to hold both together anyway.

Big food brands have been wrestling with versions of that problem for decades. McDonald’s may be one of the most standardized restaurant businesses on earth, yet its menus and campaigns constantly adapt to local markets while the Golden Arches hold everything together. Starbucks does something similar: the green Siren remains recognizable almost anywhere, while stores, products and communications can shift considerably depending on where they appear.

The Salad Project is obviously operating at a very different scale.

But international expansion eventually creates the same question.

What stays fixed, and what gets to change?

The refreshed identity seems designed to make that easier. The core visual language remains recognizable, while photography, ingredients, recommendations and digital experiences can become more local. Instead of forcing every market into precisely the same template, the system leaves room for variation.

That matters particularly for food.

People don’t eat brands.

They eat lunch.

And lunch habits can change dramatically after crossing a border.

The digital platform also tackles another problem familiar to anyone who has ordered a customized salad online. A long list of ingredients may be efficient, but it isn’t especially appetizing. Once every topping becomes another checkbox, building lunch starts feeling more like filling out a form.

The new experience leans much more heavily on imagery.

Customization becomes visual rather than purely functional, with food doing more of the selling than interface text. It’s a small change in theory, but an important one for a company whose physical restaurants depend heavily on customers seeing ingredients being prepared in front of them.

The screen needs to recreate at least some of that feeling.

That’s really what ties the entire refresh together.

The warmer colors, less perfect photography, expressive lettering and more visual ordering system all move away from the same idea: healthy food doesn’t have to look medicinal to look healthy.

Freshness can be messy.

Lunch can have personality.

And a growing restaurant brand doesn’t need to sand away every irregular edge simply because it wants to operate internationally.

The Salad Project is expanding into a much bigger world.

Its refreshed identity makes sure it doesn’t become more generic on the way there.