Honest Burgers
Honest Burgers are changing how they work from top to bottom, and switching over to regenerative farming. For a company that makes burgers in 40+ restaurants this is a BIG deal. We’ve been helping them explain all this to their teams, the media and their customers (all without using phrases like ‘sequestering carbon’). Pick up a free copy of the book in your local Honest with a side of rosemary salted fries.
📷COULD DO BETTER: From the start, we wanted to set Honest apart from the greenwash brigade. Honest didn’t want to gloss over how hard it is for a burger company to cut its carbon, and they didn’t want to dodge any difficult questions. So we dealt with everything head-on in a “we don’t have all the answers” tone. (Photo above: Honest Burgers.)
This project is as much about shaking up Honest’s supply chain, as it is talking about the quality of the soil. Regenerative farming is a knotty subject to write about but, put simply, Honest are changing how they work from top to bottom, right back to the farmers and their cows.
Regenerative farming is a BIG subject that needs some context: why is it different and what’s wrong with the way we’ve been farming up to now, anyway? It’s easy to go down a lot of rabbit holes and lose sight of the bigger “what’s that got to do with what’s on my plate?” picture. We always brought it back to Honest.
We broke the big subject down into three themes, putting BEEF (using the whole cow and why it matters) alongside FIELDS (regenerative farming and how it’s fixing a broken system) and FARMERS (why Honest is working with them directly and making it worth the farmers’ while).
As ever, this was a thinking job as much as a writing one. Splitting Honest Farming into three themes sounds like it was simple enough – it wasn’t. If you’ve ever tried summing up anything about the environment or sustainability, you’ll know the score. But once we had the structure, everything fell into place. And it’s helping the team at Honest talk about what they’re doing in a clear way, both online and on social.
Above all, the biggest thing we’ve been working with Honest on is how to make sure this doesn’t sound like another case of a brand talking themselves up and overclaiming things. “Carbon neutral” is the easier snappier, sell – most people get it these days. But what Honest are doing is more fundamental than that. It has the potential to properly change how restaurants – especially big brands in lots of places – source food for good.
