Tilda Rice
Global brand guidelines built to hold one identity across 16 markets, for a brand whose proposition is difference.
The constant had to be the rice
Industry
Food & Drink
Services
Brand Identity, Brand Guidelines, Art Direction
Results
Growth Since Launch
3.2%
Completed at
Eleven Miles (now GAIN)
Somewhere in Tilda's design files sat a single grain of rice, drawn as a vector and bought from a stock library. It had been copied onto everything that needed to look like rice, in every market, for years. Tilda DNA-tests every batch of basmati it sells, so that one small drawing was doing a lot of work it wasn't designed for.
The grain was a symptom. By 2024 the identity had grown outwards market by market, and the people running each one had been left to make sensible calls on their own. A marketing team in Delhi and a marketing team in Dubai were both doing a reasonable job, and neither had much reason to look like the other.
What that costs is recognition. A shopper who knows Tilda from a British supermarket had little reason to spot it in a shop in Dubai, and recognition is most of what a premium rice brand is selling. The obvious fix was to make all 16 markets match, and that's the one fix this brand couldn't take.
A brand that celebrated difference by accident
Tilda's whole proposition is cultural variety. The brand is found in Jamaican kitchens and Jordanian ones, and its four core communities shop around Diwali, Ramadan, Eid, Christmas, Nowruz and Carnival. Make all of that look identical and you've solved the consistency problem by deleting the thing worth being consistent about.
So the challenge was to find something fixed enough to hold the system together while colour and imagery stayed free to move. Colour was ruled out first, because colour was the part that needed to move most. And imagery was the same, since a photograph that works for a Delhi audience isn't the one that works for a Dundee one.
Ben's Original was the only competitor at the same scale, and it revealed that the answer was in the product. Across all 16 markets the cuisines change and the occasions change, but the rice doesn't.
Photographed grain by grain
Whatever held the system together had to come out of the product, because the product is the only thing in this brand that doesn't change between markets. Rice is what Tilda sells and rice is what Tilda checks, down to testing every batch for purity. That made the grain the obvious candidate, and it set the standard the graphic version had to meet.
The brand blue stayed where it was. It’s intrinsically tied to the logo, and people already recognise it from the end of an aisle. Everything built around it came from the food the rice gets eaten with, so the palette is built on flavour and food. Blueberry, Araucana Egg, Mangosteen, Radicchio, Saffron and Rice Paper. Circular carries headlines and body copy, Earth Rich is for large format.
Replacing that stock grain meant photographing the real thing, one grain at a time, across long grain, basmati, grand sella, wild and easy cook. More than 50 individual grains, all of them real. The rules written around them are about accuracy, so a lockup takes two grains at most, drawn from the rice type on the page and never repeating the same grain twice. It's a simple rule, and it keeps a rice brand identity honest about what's in the bag.
The photography art direction covers four categories, all of it shot documentary-style: people in home kitchens, recipes flat-lay, mid-moment frames of chopping and stirring, and culture on location. Most of the rules are written as refusals. The light stays natural, and nothing gets styled into a kitchen nobody has. It’s designed to look authentic and relatable.
Impressive growth since launch
Since launching the refined visual identity in 2024, every market is still working from it, and the range has kept growing underneath it since, with new dry rice lines and ready-to-heat products coming to market regularly.
The Grocer's 2025 ranking has Tilda growing volume 3.2% and value 4.3%, in a year when the average price per kilo across rice fell 1.8%.
What the grain bought was something plainer. A photograph of Tilda's own rice means the same thing on a shelf in Rainham as it does on one in Delhi, which is all brand consistency across markets really asks for.
More work
Overtone
