This week we’re featuring a guest post from designer Lydia Ekeroth. Lydia is the founder of Feel For, a visual design studio based in San Diego, serving clients everywhere. With 10+ years of experience in brand design, she works across identity, print, and digital experiences, partnering with businesses, nonprofits, and cultural organizations to create effective visual identity systems and thoughtful design solutions.  Join us on September 30th for a free webinar: CEA Branding For Sales Success: Using design and market positioning to launch, differentiate, and grow your farming business

Your Farm Already Has a Story.
Does Anyone Know It?

Grocery prices are up nearly 30% since 2020, and a recent poll found that 73% of American families are worried about being able to afford food. At the same time, concern about food safety due to FDA funding cuts has become widespread. This summer’s Cyclospora outbreak in lettuce made that anxiety especially tangible. In its aftermath, 76% percent of lettuce eaters said they’d feel comfortable eating lettuce again it were locally grown, compared with just 59% who’d be reassured simply by seeing it back in stock at their regular grocery store.

That is to say, consumers are anxious. Two questions seem to be on everyone’s mind right now: Where did this food come from, and can I trust it?

Those questions are being asked by shoppers who are no longer naive about marketing. A recent global survey found that 91% of consumers believe at least some brands engage in greenwashing. 

“All natural.” “Responsibly sourced.” “Locally grown” are among phrases that no longer provide much reassurance on their own, and consumers are increasingly investigating marketing claims and demanding transparency.

This matters even more when people are watching what they spend. When food prices are high, asking someone to choose your product is asking them to make a deliberate decision with their grocery budget. You have to first get their attention, and then earn their trust.

Whether you’re selling to a grocery chain, a local restaurant, or directly from a table at the farmers’ market, CEA has real answers to many consumer pain points: proximity, scale, a pristine growing environment, traceable processes, ethical labor practices, and so on. These aren’t marketing claims you need to fabricate, they’re real characteristics of how CEA farms typically operate. The opportunity is to make those realities visible to the people you’re trying to reach.

Having an advantage and communicating an advantage are two different things.

Your customer can’t see your growing environment. A grocery buyer can’t see your production schedule. A chef may not understand the advantages that CEA can offer year-round. And a shopper who cares about sustainability can’t necessarily tell from the package how your farm uses water, manages inputs, or grows its crops.  These advantages can be extremely meaningful, but they can’t do much for your business if they’re invisible.

That’s where brand design comes in. Design is the bridge between what a business does and what a customer understands about it.

It’s how your process, values, and points of differentiation become visible, attractive, clear and memorable. Your farm already has a story and a brand. The question is: what does your customer think your brand is?

In my design process, I often use a simple framework to help clients clarify their brand strategy and positioning, which will become the foundation for their visual identity:

The Brand Framework:

Feature
Start with what you do. Maybe you grow hydroponically, in a controlled environment, very close to the customers you’re serving.

Benefit
Next ask why should your customer care? Maybe it’s consistent quality, a more reliable supply, a more sustainable growing method, or unique year-round selections.

Proof
Then ask, how can you show them?

If you’re saying your produce is local, list the farm location. If you’re emphasizing traceability, include a harvest date or tracking information. If you claim your greens are “clean,” tell the customer what that actually means. If you’re talking about sustainability, give a specific number or measurable detail instead of a vague adjective.

The point isn’t to make a claim more convincing through better design. It’s to make something that’s already true easier to see, understand, and verify.

Consistency Compounds

Design determines whether your product earns attention in the first place, what specific information is conveyed and how easily a skeptical customer can understand and trust it. And it’s not just about communicating individual facts; when a well-designed identity system shows up consistently across packaging, signage, website, social, marketing, those individual touchpoints start to add up to something bigger over time: a coherent, recognizable impression of who you are. AKA, your brand.

There’s a definition I like: your brand is whatever your customers believe it to be. If you have a business, you already have a brand, whether or not you’ve had any role in shaping it. 

This is the difference between strategy-driven design and decoration. The goal isn’t to make your farm look “nice” for its own sake. It’s to understand what matters to your customers, identify what makes your business meaningfully different, and build a visual system that communicates that clearly and consistently. That consistency is what builds loyalty, earns repeat customers, and turns real operational advantages into a business advantage.

Your farm already has a story. Making sure that it’s visible, attractive, clear, and credible, is design’s job.

If this conversation sounds interesting, join us next week as we walk through a practical framework for figuring out your own positioning, real examples of how it plays out in CEA, and more.