SHOPHOUSE PANTRY

STRATEGY, BRANDING, COPY, ART DIRECTION, PACKAGING, DIGITAL & SOCIAL

Gourmet Asian ready-made meals, delivered.

Shophouse Pantry is Melbourne’s newest online ready-made meals delivery service, combining the best of Asian home-style cooking with family recipes from the food capitals of Asia. Created to remove that guilty feeling after ordering an Asian takeaway, Shophouse Pantry’s recipes are Aunty-approved and served in under 3 mins. Made in Melbourne with local ingredients, each meal is made fresh and not frozen. It’s the quickest, fuss-free alternative for parents on-the-go, busy professionals, foodies, and uni students that miss the taste of homemade food.

OPPORTUNITY

Created by Brian Taing of Workshop Brothers, a familiar face in Melbourne’s cafe and coffee landscape, the idea came about during lockdown when he and his wife had their first baby. Accustomed to ordering takeaway from popular food delivery platforms, Brian and his wife realised it wasn’t the best way to keep trim but they just didn’t have the energy to cook. He googled “Asian delivery meals” and tried many of the well-known meal delivery companies, but he still missed the authentic taste of home. So he set himself a path of creating ready-to-heat and serve meals that would remind him of his favourites found throughout Southeast Asia. He refined the concept during COVID-19 with his lockdown support packs for their family and friends.

EXECUTION

Brandworks Melbourne and BrandWorks Jakarta provided an end-to-end solution, including branding and packaging and art direction to website development, social media management and digital marketing.

The studio looked to Brian’s family story, his Cambodian heritage and their refugee origins to bring a new visual dimension for the brand to an already crowded food meal category. The idea of home-style cooking, Aunty-approved recipes and Hawker street food provided the foundation for the brand. It’s fun, tongue-in-cheek and the vibrant colours are what you’d expect to find in a morning market in downtown Bangkok.

Featuring 13 meals that start from $11.90 per serve, the new range is vegetarian friendly, and includes ‘Long Life’ Hokkien Noodles, ‘Miso-Happy’ Baked Salmon Fried Rice and Thai Green ‘Tuk Tuk’ Curry just to name a few. Each meal is packaged in a vibrant sleeve that calls out its origins with words of inspiration. The photography was inspired by the mismatched plating that would typically be seen in Brian’s home, a homage to his “borrowing” of his Aunties recipes to develop the range.

Shophouse Pantry launches in early November 2020.

@shophousepantry

Image credit: Jake Roden