After selling its chain of grocery stores, Ukrop’s launched a new company—Ukrop’s Homestyle Foods—and asked Elevation to leverage our unique combination of retail branding and promotional experience plus business-to-business marketing experience to develop a family of brands that could be sold at grocery stores throughout the United States.
We created three separate brands to meet very different marketing objectives:
Brand 1: Ukrop’s Homestyle Foods
Ukrop’s continued to offer its traditional lines of bakery goods and prepared foods through the chain of supermarkets that purchased the family’s grocery stores. Our challenge was to create a new brand while leveraging the trust that consumers had for the original one—and remind them of more than 70 years of Ukrop’s heritage.
We leveraged the traditional Ukrop’s logo and added an authenticity seal to help consumers be able to spot true Ukrop’s items on store shelves. The seal was promoted through in-store point-of-purchase communications, as well as email communications and social media aimed at longtime Ukrop’s customers.
We redesigned all product packaging to feature the new seal, and were able to sustain the loyalty of Ukrop’s customers by helping them understand that they could continue to find the brand they knew and loved exclusively at the new grocery chain.
Brand 2: Good Meadow Homemades
While maintaining their traditional brand in many stores, Ukrop’s also sought to develop a new brand that could be sold through other grocery chains. Because the Ukrop’s name had less brand awareness and loyalty outside of the commonwealth, we had the opportunity to build a new, stand-alone brand for Ukrop’s that could capture many of the same attributes Richmond families loved, while building loyalty to a new brand.
Our solution was Good Meadow Homemades. In naming the brand we made a nod to the family’s history (the Ukrop family migrated to the United States from a Slavic town whose name translates to “Good Meadow”) while building a communication platform around nourishing families with wholesome foods. Our “Made Fresh, Made For Sharing” positioning brought warmth to the category and reflected the quality and freshness of the foods being offered.
Elevation created the brand from the ground up—from naming and logo development to graphic platform creation, packaging design and all in-store promotional materials. The brand was quickly picked up by other grocery chains, and now extends to stores as far north as Pennsylvania.
Brand 3: White House Rolls
Based on research, Ukrop’s recognized an opportunity to spin off its popular White House Rolls product as a stand-alone brand that could be sold through multiple grocery chains.
The challenge for this brand was that while Central Virginians knew that White House Rolls could be used for almost anything, target audiences to the north associate rolls with dinner only. Our challenge was to keep our loyal core customers while also positioning the roll to be accepted as an anytime snack or anytime meal solution.
We developed a position of “The World’s Most Perfect Roll” to help educate consumers about the many uses of the White House Roll. We infused the brand with a playful spirit that captures the joy and delight that comes from the product.
In addition to creating all advertising and in-store promotions for White House Rolls, we have also worked to activate the brand through event sponsorships and more—leveraging our illustrated roll character to bring White House Rolls everywhere from road races to basketball games. White House Rolls are now available in 30 states.