Bite Back is a youth activist movement challenging a food system that’s been set up to fool us all. In 2019, 12 youth activists hungry for change began petitioning the UK government and schools to stop global food companies overly promoting junk food. The movement has grown exponentially, but the global food system remains incredibly complex, unfair and unregulated — contributing to an epidemic of food-related ill health, with almost 1 in 3 children aged 2-15 at risk of developing conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease. 

There was so much more Bite Back needed to do to combat a landscape where 15 billion online junk food ads bombard people every year, while good food is increasingly unaffordable for more and more families. Bite Back needed a new narrative that would stop framing children and their families as too poorly educated and too lazy to eat well, and an identity that would cut through longstanding debates about child health, touching on everything from the NHS to obesity, nutrition and class. 

We helped evolve the brand into one that could call out and fight corporations with huge budgets and little accountability by turning their most insidious tactics against them.

Turning childish marketing tactics against the giants

The new Bite Back brand aims to shift the narrative on food by calling out ‘corporate irresponsibility’, highlighting how the ‘junk food giants have our children surrounded’ and demanding that food companies stop bombarding children with unhealthy options. 

The new visual identity is inspired by ‘brandalism’, the subversion of marketing and critique of corporate control. It uses a colour palette inspired by junk food marketing (including colours like ‘Chicken Shop Red,’ ‘Deep-Fried Yellow’ and ‘Unlicensed Mauve’) and the typography includes nausea-inducing fonts named ‘Fried Serif,’ ‘Sugar Rush Round’, and ‘Cereal Script’.

The brand’s voice plays a central role in the identity, playing with the language of food and calling out junk food marketers with lines like ‘Fork the System’, ‘Cereal Offenders’ and a new tagline: ‘Fuel us, don’t fool us.’ 

The brand aims to create a ‘penny drop moment’ - a moment where people realise that they’re surrounded by a flood of junk and incredibly childish tactics every day. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The identity takes the incredibly common typefaces, colours and even highly saturated photography styles you find in so much food marketing, sticks them all in a blender, and puts them in the hands of young people as a tool for progress.

Fuelling the future

The new brand is a tool for youthful expression and protest. 

Since its launch in September 2023, Bite Back has been smashing its recruitment, engagement and advocacy targets. Engagement rates on social media have increased by 250% and there’s been a 254% uplift in net audience growth when compared to the 2 months prior to launch.

14,000 new young people in schools across the country have seen the new brand in assemblies led by youth activists, and completed lessons exploring the impact of food giants on their lives.

_{Credits: Animade, Animation / Fakery, Billboard / Ejatu Shaw, Photographer}