allergen.io
Building a brand from scratch for the future of food safety.
The client–
allergen.io is an automated allergen menu that integrates with hospitality venue EPOS systems to provide a safer solution for customers with food allergies and reduce admin for staff. As a tech start up, they needed a brand and website to take the system to market.
The challenge—
With allergen legislation tightening across the UK hospitality sector, Harrison Carloss identified a gap in the market for a fully automated menu management platform. allergen.io was born from this insight: a system that keeps allergen, pricing and nutritional information accurate and consistent across every touchpoint, from EPOS to in-venue devices to customer-facing menus.
As a brand new venture with no existing identity, allergen.io needed to be built from the ground up, and Harrison Carloss took on the full brief: brand development, brand identity, a bespoke website and a launch marketing campaign.
Brand development and identity—
Before any design work began, the team researched hospitality brands and allergy charities to establish a colour palette that would stand out in the sector while still feeling credible and at home within it. The result combines green, representing food and healthy eating, with yellow, a colour long associated with warning and caution. Together, the two speak directly to what the brand stands for: safe, healthy dining.
The logo carries the brand’s cleverest piece of thinking. The “e” in allergen is built from half an asterisk, the symbol widely used on menus to flag a dish containing allergens, with the negative space also forming the outline of a knife or a frying pan. This makes the “e” a submark in its own right, versatile enough to work on its own across social, packaging and signage while still tying back to the full wordmark.
A bespoke, one-page website—
The website was built with a bespoke design on WordPress as a one-page site that reloads content dynamically rather than navigating to separate pages, giving visitors a fast, seamless way to move through the story of the brand.
Behind the scenes, allergen.io itself runs on a bespoke system built in Laravel, the centralised menu management platform that keeps allergen, pricing and nutritional data in sync across every channel from a single source of truth.
Launch campaign—
To bring the brand to market, Harrison Carloss ran a launch campaign combining PR, social media advertising and a launch video, supported by faux billboard mock-ups used to give the new brand instant scale and presence before it existed in the physical world.
The result—
From a blank page to a fully formed brand, allergen.io now has a distinctive identity, a bespoke digital presence and a launch campaign built to make an immediate impact in a sector under growing regulatory pressure.
Our branding services provide a long-lasting visual impact, but are built on detailed research with a strategic purpose. Whether you’re developing a new or existing brand for your business we’d love to hear from you.