Hot Bread Kitchen is an innovative social enterprise that employs and empowers immigrant and low-income women in the art of making and selling bread. Founded by Jessamyn Rodriguez, the non-profit bakery provides paid on-the-job training and produces breads inspired by its bakers and the countries they come from. The multi-faceted program creates a platform for developing regional and ethnic bread products, teaching English as a second language, and entrepreneurship. Pentagram has designed branding for Hot Bread Kitchen that highlights the bakery’s mission and helps raise its profile as it begins to expand from New York to other cities. 

Hot Bread Kitchen’s unique program of “breaducation” transforms the lives of everyone who comes in contact with it. Central to the undertaking is creating amazing artisanal bread that people first want to buy for its quality, and secondarily to support the mission. The bakery is based at La Marqueta, the historic market in Harlem, and its breads are sold at New York’s Greenmarkets and other grocery stores, including Whole Foods. The bakery is also an incubator for food startups, with an on-site kitchen that is rented out to small entrepreneurs. Hot Bread Kitchen has grown quickly since it was founded in 2007 and many of its bakers have gone on to work at top restaurants or to successfully start their own businesses. From its small roots, Hot Bread Kitchen is now reaching a pivot point of beginning national distribution and setting up kitchens in other parts of the country.

The designers collaborated with Hot Bread Kitchen on a pro-bono basis, seeing in the project an inspiring combination of education, activism, and the revitalization of bread traditions. The design had to establish a distinctive visual identity for the bakery and accommodate a variety of different formats and languages.

A simple, scalable system of pre-printed and clear bags and stickers allows Hot Bread Kitchen to create their small-batch runs. The design is meant to impart a sense of the care and detail of making bread, as well as the vernacular and ethnic traditions. The logo is set in Wilma, a typeface influenced by American vernacular, and the round seal incorporates Hot Bread Kitchen’s motto, “Preserving Traditions/Rising Expectations.” When applicable, the label may display the name of the bread in its native language, including Hebrew, Farsi, Spanish, Arabic and Armenian.

The branding features a pattern comprised of 28 classic ingredients and tools used in bread production, from wheat, water, rye and eggs, to butter, spoons and whisks. The pattern evokes the decorative traditions that can be seen across the many different cultures that make bread, and the icons may be selected to reflect the ingredients used in specific kinds of bread. A color palette of contemporary shades of eggplant, blue, gold and green completes the artisanal look and feel.