— Food & Beverage / CPG / E-Commerce
True North Tins
True North Tins is a concept premium tinned seafood brand inspired by Canada’s coasts, modern pantry culture, wine nights, picnic blankets, and the growing love for elevated everyday food.
Food & Beverage
Brand Identity
SEO & Local Search • Content Strategy, Copywriting, E-Commerce • Print & Collateral • Brand Identity • Web Design & Development • Meta & Google Ads • Social Media Management • Email Marketing •
Industries served
12+
E-comm, beauty, food, trades & more
— Client
True North Tins Inc.
Studio Concept Project
— industry
Food & Beverage / CPG / E-Commerce
— services
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Brand Strategy
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Logo System
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Visual Identity
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Illustration System
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Packaging
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Shopify Website Direction
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Social Media System
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Retail Assets
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Campaign Design
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Environmental Display Concepts
— the challenge
Canned seafood feel less like a backup plan and more like the main event.
Tinned seafood has a strong history, but it often carries dated associations. For many consumers, canned fish can feel utilitarian, old-fashioned, or overly practical. At the same time, modern food culture has created a renewed interest in pantry luxury, grazing boards, wine pairings, specialty groceries, and beautifully packaged food products.
The challenge was to reposition tinned seafood as something people would actually want to display, gift, subscribe to, bring to a picnic, or open during a wine night.
The brand needed to feel premium, but not sterile. It needed to reference Canada and the coast without feeling cliché. It also needed to work across many touchpoints: tin packaging, gift boxes, Shopify pages, social media, recipe cards, retail displays, and event booth design.
The question became: how can a tinned seafood brand feel like a lifestyle brand?
"How can a tinned seafood brand feel like a lifestyle brand?"
The answer was to build the identity around Canadian coastal nostalgia meets modern snack culture.
Logo system — primary lockup, secondary mark, and wordmark.
— the approach
Canadian coastal nostalgia meets
modern snack culture.
The brand was positioned as a premium Canadian seafood company for pantry people, picnic people, wine-night people, and “girl dinner but elevated” people.
Instead of treating the product as basic canned fish, the strategy reframed each tin as a small, beautifully designed food experience. The brand language focuses on origin, flavour, simplicity, and occasion.
The visual direction borrows from vintage seafood labels, coastal markets, picnic culture, maritime signage, old print textures, and modern boutique grocery branding. The result is a system that feels nostalgic and familiar, but still bold, polished, and highly ownable.
Core brand ideas include:
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Canadian seafood, beautifully preserved.
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Packed on the coast. Opened anywhere.
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Small tins. Big snack energy.
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A little tin of the Atlantic.
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Seafood worth saving.
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For wine nights, picnic blankets, and superior snack plates.
— brand identity, logo, illustration system, and packaging
Make every tin feel like a
small piece of Canada's Coast.
The True North Tins visual identity brings the logo, illustration style, and packaging system into one cohesive world. At the centre is a bold vintage-inspired mark featuring a fish, open tin, sun, waves, picnic cloth, and maple leaf accents. Paired with distressed print texture, warm cream backgrounds, navy linework, seafoam, butter yellow, and tomato red, the brand feels nostalgic, coastal, Canadian, and modern enough for today’s pantry culture.
The packaging extends this language across six flavours, each with its own simple illustrated icon and colour cue: Smoked Atlantic Salmon with Maple Syrup, PEI Mussels with Garlic & Butter, Nova Scotia Smoked Trout, Sardines in Chili Crisp Oil, Oysters in Sea Salt Brine, and Mackerel in Oil & Dill. Together, the tins feel collectible, giftable, and shelf-ready — premium enough for specialty grocers and wine shops, but playful enough for picnics, snack plates, and everyday hosting.
— Social media
Built to live
on every screen.
The social system translates the packaging's coastal, editorial feel into content that doesn't read like typical CPG marketing. Instead of generic product shots, the brand leans into styling, pairing ideas, and a bit of dry humour about snacking well.
Social content examples include:
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Flavour spotlight posts
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Tin-board styling ("how to build a spread with one tin")
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Recipe and pairing content
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Coastal sourcing stories and photography
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Subscription box unboxings
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Seasonal occasion content (wine night, picnic season, holiday gifting)
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Behind-the-label illustration process
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Customer tin-board submissions
Example post language:
NOW OPEN: Smoked Atlantic Salmon, straight from the coast. TONIGHT'S PLAN: one tin, one bottle, zero effort. PACKED ON THE COAST. OPENED ANYWHERE. THIS WEEK'S CATCH: PEI Mussels in Garlic & Butter.
This gives the brand a content system built around occasions, not just products — easy to repeat without ever feeling like ad copy.
Full Deliverables
✓ Primary logo + secondary mark + icon
✓ Typography system & usage guide
✓ Brand pattern & texture system
✓ Print-ready inserts and brochures
✓ Illustration system (six flavour icons)
✓ Packaging design
✓ Retail & environmental display assets
✓ Shopify website direction
✓ 6 social media templates
✓ Campaign design concepts
— the result
A brand that turns
turns a pantry staple into something worth showing off.
The final identity gives True North Tins a complete, ownable brand world — not just a logo on a can, but a full point of view on what tinned seafood can be. It's not "canned fish." It's a coastal object worth keeping around.
The system shows up consistently across packaging, retail shelves, gifting, social content, and the Shopify storefront. Every touchpoint reinforces the same idea: this is Canada's coast, preserved and packaged with care.
The result is a brand that feels premium without losing its sense of humour — collectible enough for a specialty grocer's shelf, and casual enough to crack open on a Tuesday night.
"True North Tins turns a pantry staple into the best thing on the table."
Client
Wild Flour Bakery Co.
Industry
Food
Tags
Brand Identity | Marketing | Social Media |
Wild Flour Bakery is a small-batch artisan bakery specializing in handcrafted sourdough and rustic pastries. For this project, the goal was to create a warm, tactile brand identity that felt nostalgic yet fresh — rooted in the tradition of slow, mindful baking. We developed a full visual system including a hand-drawn logo, secondary mark, and packaging graphics inspired by vintage recipe cards, botanical flourishes, and earthy textures. The brand’s personality leans into a sense of homegrown charm with a touch of quiet elegance.
The visual identity features a soft, neutral palette — cream, warm brown, herb green, and wheat gold — paired with serif and sans-serif typography for a balanced, rustic-modern tone. We designed seamless illustrations of bakery elements like bread, wheat stalks, and whisks, which were used across packaging, patterns, and brand collateral. A fully illustrated, single-page menu was created alongside custom stickers, stamps, and signage, all aligned with the hand-drawn look. Social media templates carried the identity across digital channels with launch countdowns, product features, and ingredient spotlights.
The final delivery included a full logo suite, print-ready menu and label designs, a digital launch kit, and a brand guide outlining color usage, type, and illustration treatments. Wild Flour launched with a cohesive, personality-rich identity that could be adapted across both physical and digital touchpoints. The result is a bakery brand that feels not only crafted—but deeply cared for, just like the bread it sells.
