Plants

Clever cooking and the possibility of plants

Brand Strategy
Brand Story
Tone of Voice
Personality
Design Partnership
Copywriting

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A brand idea that turned the panic of “I don’t have time!” into a positive reframe: “What can I do with ten minutes?”

Social prompts that focused on the occasion and encouraged customers to make Plants products their own

Copy that leans into the IKEA effect – the idea that people feel more connected to what they’ve had a hand in creating.

A story than connected founder expertise with tabletime shortcuts.

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Key Copy

What could you cook in ten minutes that would bring you joy?
Pesto-y mushrooms on toast. Squash tortelloni drizzled with the good olive oil. Five bean chilli to warm up and serve with smashed avo.
With over a decade of experience and thousands of recipes under our belt, we’ve tasted what’s possible with plants.

“The brand platform Sonder & Tell and Belief Machines built is our guiding light – simple, clear, and prescriptive, yet rich with creative potential. Crucially, it defines a role for our founders without them defining the brand.

Bringing two specialist agencies together delivered more focus and quality than any full-service agency could. We’re thrilled with the results – buying teams are already responding positively. We feel like you have really uncovered gold in our new positioning and we have the perfect platform to drive our growth.”

– Kerry Atack, MD

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From range to brand

In 2022, Deliciously Ella introduced Plants, a 100% natural, plant-based sub-brand with 44 SKUs, launching exclusively at Waitrose. A year later, following Deliciously Ella’s acquisition by HERO Group,, Ella, Matthew and the team faced a crucial challenge: how to evolve Plants into an independent, modern plant-based brand set for long-term future growth

Plants had a strong foundation, but they needed a clearer identity that could engage a wider audience and appeal to a mass flexitarian audience. The ambition was to celebrate plant-based abundance, making the brand more vibrant, exciting, and distinctive – and to develop a creative platform and identity refresh that the entire brand could use as a jumping off point for customers and buyers alike.

The Insight

People want the ease of convenience with the joy of cooking.

We always start by listening. In customer interviews, we kept hearing the same things:

“I love cooking, but I don’t have time.”
“I want to cook – but life gets in the way.”
“It’s hard to cook from scratch while juggling work and little ones.”

Cooking hadn’t stopped being important – it had just become harder to fit into real life. This wasn’t just a customer truth. It was a founder truth, too. Ella Mills (founder of Deliciously Ella) built an entire business around her love of food. But running two companies and raising young kids, her joy in cooking often had to take a backseat.

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What can I create with the time I have?

Plants embraced this insight by redefining convenience – not as a shortcut, but as a catalyst for creativity. Instead of replacing the cooking experience, Plants became a partner in it, offering quick wins that made customers feel resourceful, capable and inspired. The brand shifted the mindset from “I don’t have time” to “What can I create in the time I have?”, transforming even five minutes into an opportunity for joy.

The brand platform – The Possibility of Plants – is about applying an abundance mindset to the time you have in the kitchen, inspiring customers to put a little effort in to get a lot of satisfaction out. Led by Beleif Machines, the new design and packaging refresh was crafted to make plant-based eating feel indulgent, packed with flavour effortless, and essential for home cooks.