Can you guess where this egg comes from?

Provenance is one of the most overused words in food branding. Everyone wants to talk about it, but in reality different customers need different levels of information.

Many growing food brands start with strong local roots, then look to scale. That’s where it gets interesting. Anchor the brand too tightly to one place and you can limit its future. Remove place altogether and you risk losing the trust and authenticity that provenance brings.

In this project, our brief was to do both. Connect with local customers who might recognise the place, without tying the brand to a single city — and still make the pack work nationally for shoppers who simply want something that feels grounded, credible and considered.

A more useful way to think about provenance isn’t as a pin on a map, but as a set of signals: care, standards, environment and consistency.

Here, we used illustration to carry those signals. Rather than naming a location, the pack shows a quintessentially English rural landscape with subtle architectural cues. If you’re local, you might spot the city of Oxford. If you’re not, it still reads as somewhere well cared for and trustworthy.

The result is a pack that feels rooted — without being restricted.

And that’s often the point with provenance: it doesn’t always need to be stated. Sometimes it works better when it’s implied.

Get in touch to discuss your brand challenges.