A consortium of designers, branding professionals, and grocery experts have been named to design a visual identity for New York City’s municipal grocery stores. Their goal? To make something that looks authentically New York.
New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) said Tuesday it had selected four firms—Gander, Librarie, Noble Signs, and Seven Roots—to brand the city’s five forthcoming grocery stores, one for each borough.
Gander, the strategic branding firm behind visual identities for brands like the squeeze bottle olive oil Graza and Yellow Bird hot sauce, will be the project lead and oversee research, strategy, naming, brand application, and brand development. Their inclusion suggests the finished product could borrow from the best practices of some of recent history’s most popular direct-to-consumer brands.
“We consider ourselves, for better or worse, grocery store nerds, and probably get way too much enjoyment out of wandering the aisles of grocery stores everywhere we travel,” Gander partner Mike McVicar tells Fast Company. Gander calls it a dream project since it’s a major civic project for the city they love, and it’s a grocery store.
“Our top priority is to help make this ambitious effort to address food insecurity in our city as wildly successful as possible, and ultimately help as many people as possible,” McVicar says. “That means building a brand that resonates with an infinitely diverse population of New York City that has really high standards.”
The boutique brand consultancy Librarie, which has advised brands like Stiller’s and the THC-infused beverage brand Cann, will co-lead on brand positioning, voice, copy, and naming. Librarie’s Fern Diaz says she hopes the consortium can turn the language around affordability and abundance from “words that can feel like policy jargon,” into something that New Yorkers “feel and experience.”
The consultancy Noble Signs, a multidisciplinary creative studio that founded the New York Sign Museum, will consult on New York City history and culture so the final visual assets feel authentic to the city. Noble Signs has done work for Ace’s Pizza in Brooklyn and created hand-painted signage for New York City Councilman Justin Brannan’s Coney Island office.
Seven Roots, an independent grocery store design and development firm, will advise on food retail, operations, and integrating the brand into the physical retail environment. The only firm in the consortium that isn’t based in New York City, Seven Roots has developed independent grocery stores and community-owned food co-ops.
Seven Roots managing partner Heather Lazickas says the firm hopes their work contributes to a solid foundation for the NYC Groceries initiative, and she adds that the stores “will undoubtedly offer valuable lessons and inspiration for communities across the country working to strengthen their food access landscapes.”
The NYCEDC announced in May that it was opening requests for proposals for NYC Groceries. It was seeking brand research into industry trends and consumer habits, a visual identity and design application for the look of the stores, product private labeling, and branded merchandise, as well as architecture and engineering collaboration.
The four winning firms, which are subject to approval by the NYCEDC Board of Directors, will work together and with NYCEDC and City Hall to develop the brand identity and execute on its other deliverables.
“Our municipal grocery stores should be a place every New Yorker recognizes and feels welcome in,” Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su said in a statement. “With expertise and experience in branding, city history, and grocery retail, this team will help us deliver stores that make affordable food easy to find in every borough.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned last year on city-run grocery stores, and since taking office, he’s allocated $70 million in the city’s capital budget to the project. For a politician who’s shown a keen eye for smart, attractive visual branding in politics and government, that one of his signature campaign promises is getting a team of pros to make sure it’s branded well isn’t surprising.
But a welcoming visual identity will also be one key component to turning these municipal grocery stores into a success. NYCEDC CEO Anthony Shorris said selecting the right firms was an important step in “creating grocery stores that are welcoming, easy to recognize, and unmistakably New York.”
The first store, a 20,000-square-foot location at the Peninsula in the Bronx, is expected to open by 2027, and a second location has been identified for a 9,000-square-foot store in East Harlem. NYCEDC says all five stores are expected to be open by the end of Mamdani’s first term in 2030.
