Mindful Chef Puts The Joy Of Healthy Cooking Back Into Meal Kits

Mindful Chef, the UK’s premium healthy recipe box service, has unveiled a new brand refresh created in partnership with independent branding and design studio Mother Design.       

Mindful Chef aims to engage a modern, health-conscious, busy audience. People who need convenient options, but are forced to settle for lacklustre meals packed with mysterious ingredients. And, generally, the meal kit category also settles for convenience over care, stripping food of the joy, flavour and quality customers are craving. At a time when British consumers have lost connection to real food, Mindful Chef helps its audience reconnect with the act of cooking easy, nourishing meals packed with trustworthy ingredients and brimming with quality they can see, smell and taste.

Centred around its mission ‘Eat well. Live better,’ it offers health-focused, from-scratch cooking, developed by a team of chefs into pre-portioned recipes that can be on the table in under 30 minutes. The challenge? Its mission wasn’t reflected in the brand’s aesthetic — from typography choices to art direction, right down to the way recipes were written and laid out.

Mother Design’s starting point — the creative platform ‘Yes, Mindful Chef’ — seeks to elevate everyday home cooks to chef status, without the pretension that typically comes with the category. The entire identity was designed to feel right at home in the culinary world. Using design, imagery and writing that transforms Mindful Chef into its audience’s sous chef. Our images and voice make our audience the protagonist, heavily featuring everyday kitchens, the  joyful act of cooking and finishing touches that transform simple meals into culinary delights.

The refresh spans every element of the brand. The colour world has been evolved to reflect a variety of rich ingredients, while bringing warmth, vibrancy and elevated health cues. Aubergine anchors the palette with depth and sophistication, balanced by Oat – a warm off-white that introduces calm – while fresh accent tones add energy and modernity. Colours often frame dishes like artworks to heighten appetite appeal and reinforce Mindful Chef’s focus on high-quality, beautiful produce.

Typography, inspired by the visual language of culinary editorial, is central to the identity, with two expressive typefaces that create rhythm, texture and delight. Ostia Antica, used throughout recipes, stories and body copy, captures the chef-like balance of passion and precision. It is paired with Bourrasque, a condensed headline typeface that introduces warmth and impactful scale. Ostia Antica's wide letterforms and Bourrasque's tall, condensed shapes work together like a great flavour pairing, bringing variation throughout the brand world. This is enhanced further by motion design that wraps type around the edges of the recipe box itself — a new distinctive characteristic for the brand. 

The brand refresh also introduces a renewed approach to photography and art direction, first revealed publicly in a nationwide Telegraph feature.

Mother Design ignored the category’s familiar visual tropes – overhead dishes, bright, flat lighting and information-heavy layouts that obscure ingredient quality – and developed a more elevated, expressive alternative that reflects Mindful Chef’s focus on premium produce and provenance. Working with lifestyle photographer Yuki Sugiura, food stylist Emily Kidd and props stylist Rachel Vere, the team defined a new approach built around natural light and premium, yet relaxed styling. The imagery celebrates the beauty of produce, the sensory pleasure of cooking and the pride of plating, using warm lighting, thoughtful props and real hands to show the full cooking journey and reinforce the customer’s role as the chef. 

Layout draws inspiration from premium cookbooks and food magazines. Simple grid structures, intentional negative space and structural elements like column lines and page-edge highlights create a sense of pace and nourishment. The layouts handle information-heavy content and bold visual stories with equal clarity, ensuring the brand world feels high-quality, modern and grounded in real food culture.

A set of sculptural graphic textures adds a final layer of craft, treating ingredients as artistic forms. Used sparingly, these textures reinforce the brand’s appreciation for provenance, mindful preparation and the pleasure of high-quality food.

A new tone of voice completes the refresh by bridging the gap between Mindful Chef’s chefs and its customers, positioning the home cook as the protagonist. The language celebrates ingredients, the joy of good health and elevates everyday cooking with warmth and confidence.

The established logo takes on two new roles: an immersive sign-off within stories and imagery, where it is rotated five degrees and bleeds gently off the edge of the frame to create a final moment of connection between chef and customer; and a classic bottom-right signature, allowing the food itself to lead. Across both applications, the logo becomes a confident badge of authenticity and trust, reinforcing the brand’s emphasis on high-quality cooking grounded in real provenance.

The refreshed brand world feels premium while staying warm, human and rooted in day-to-day reality. Mother Design’s ambition was to translate this platform into a modern, distinctive and elevated brand world – one that reflects Mindful Chef’s belief that healthy eating should feel inspiring, pleasurable and genuinely desirable, and that places health and quality at the centre of every touchpoint.

The refreshed brand world is rolling out across Mindful Chef’s website, magazine, packaging including delivery boxes, social channels, email and wider digital touchpoints, following its introduction in the Telegraph.

Mary Rochester Gearing, Chief Marketing Officer, Mindful Chef, said: “Mindful Chef was created to help people eat well and live better. This refresh renews that ambition, placing joy, warmth and chef-quality at the centre of its expression. The new brand world celebrates our ingredients, elevates our home cooks, and reflects the care that goes into making dinner from scratch. Mother Design has helped us reassert what Mindful Chef stands for: health, quality and real food.”

Annabel Engels, Managing Director, Mother Design, added: “This refresh arrives at a crucial moment for Mindful Chef and the category as a whole. The new brand world brings clarity, distinction and a renewed sense of craft, helping Mindful Chef stand out in culture while staying true to its mission of inspiring healthy living.”

Jo Tulej, Creative Director, Mother Design, concluded: “For a lot of people, being able to cook something nourishing for themselves is precious, and this refresh puts that feeling at the heart of the brand. Our work brings together everything people love about Mindful Chef: chef-quality produce, joyful cooking moments and the pleasure of eating well. From typography to photography to the refreshed colour palette, every element has been crafted to celebrate the art of healthy living. It’s been a privilege to help shape a brand that people feel proud to cook with.”

Credits

Agency – Mother Design
Annabel Engels – Managing Director
Kirsty Minns - Executive Creative Director

Jo Tulej – Creative Director

Alex Cupial-Jones – Design Director
Dan Burrows – Digital Design DirectorÉrika Muller – Art Director
Saskia Wood – Designer
Matt Sadler – Strategy Director
Zuki Sedgley – Copy Director
Natalie Hart – Copy Director

Client
Mary Rochester Gearing, CMO, Mindful Chef