The Salad Project
A digital flagship for premium fast food.
SERVICES:-
Production, content, videography, photography, web design
SECTORS:Hospitality, Technology
Understanding the Brief
The Salad Project is one of the Top 50 fastest-growing private companies in the UK. With 15 premium quick service restaurants established in London, and a new store soon to open in Paris, the business is driven by founders Florian and James' strong ambition to create the world's best salad bars.
As genuine brand fans build the hype across Slack channels at lunchtime and WhatsApp groups for dinner, go-to dishes are becoming cult faves. Curated for Goop girls, fitness champions, corporate go-getters and creatives, the brand is fuelling a new fast food culture in the city, with queues out the door are daily.
Our partnership needed to build a digital flagship that mirrors the undoubtedly seamless and premium in-store experience. We designed, developed and launched a new website for The Salad Project to get people to great salad even sooner.
Finding the Unfound
As 77% of diners check a restaurant's website before visiting or ordering, the need for a strong digital flagship is crucial for any hospitality business. We found this strength from within during frequent store visits, sharing conversations at TSP HQ and enjoying bowls together with (and as) real customers. It uncovered exciting ingrained truths and efficiencies to communicate across the site; the kind you can only get once you’ve experienced picking up your fave salad during the lunchtime rush.
This close collaboration uncovered significant drivers. The Salad Project team have a clear and real obsession with details; from bowl buildability, to material finishes in store, to loyalty systems and curated serving systems. This voracious appetite for design coupled with a generous intention to fuel healthy lifestyles in the city enabled us to strive for better choices across the board.
We focused on translating much loved interactions, values and premium touches from the physical world into its digital presence. Building the new site enabled The Salad Project to remove ordering barriers, strengthen connection to the brand and raise the bar of fast food.
Under the Surface
Designing and building this website went beyond simply selling more salad bowls. Yes, the digital presence of the brand had to level up across every facet but underneath it all, the site needed to handle frequent content updates without losing aesthetic consistency.
Developing a stable infrastructure with a strong UI system, we delivered a premium frontend and a backend that can be added to just as often as new salads are created. The website also became a solid mainframe for multiple third party fulfilment platforms, from catering to Deliveroo, and even The Salad Project’s own merch store (shoutout The Goat Collection).
Raising the verbal and visual storytelling of the brand throughout each component meant evolving current brand voice and visual identity. Identifying areas to elevate brand comms, we supported The Salad Project with hero content (such as the Loyalty App video for SPAPP+) from concept, to shoot and post-production.
"We came to Unfound with a challenge: to create a website experience that shows people exactly what makes The Salad Project the best salad bar in the world. To say they took the bull by the horns and made it happen would be an understatement.
From day one, our work together was a completely collaborative, zero-judgement process, one that let us think bigger and find the most creative solutions. Jay and the team took the time to properly understand not just our brief, but us - how we think, what we're precious about, where we needed pushing. It showed at every turn: the agency felt like an extension of our own, feedback loops led to real steps forward rather than just more rounds, and the solutions on the table consistently exceeded what we asked for.
The end result is something we're proud of, and it's been a privilege getting there together. We can't wait to work together again.."
- Courtenay Lewis, Head of Brand
Unearthing Value
From storytelling to CX, we delivered a newly defined digital presence that gets people to great salad sooner. Whenever customers browse the URL, they’re now able to interact with the same premium brand they’ve come to love IRL.
Supporting an organisation to grow a fresh understanding of what fast food can be, our partnership with The Salad Project serves healthy lifestyles right where the culture’s at. Building brand fans and strengthening customer loyalty through salad you can actually get excited about.
Unfound Studio Samples
