The National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF) is charged with attracting new talent to the restaurant and foodservice industry and helping them develop the skills needed to succeed. As the nation’s second largest private sector employer, the restaurant and foodservice industry offers diverse and nearly limitless opportunities for career success.
The challenge is that many people are unaware of the vast potential in the industry, or highly skeptical, seeing foodservice as a dead end. The NRAEF came to Grafik to help them tell their story and connect with their audiences.
An important hub for educators, students, and industry members alike, the NRAEF.org website was a natural starting point. The site was rich with information and important program materials but difficult to navigate, and the design was showing its age. A series of interviews with NRAEF members, teachers, and industry partners shed light on their audiences’ needs and helped us determine what to keep and what to update.
Working closely with NRAEF, we gave the website a fresh, restaurant-inspired look and voice to convey more of the energy of the industry. We developed visuals and copy to celebrate a diverse array of career roles and restructured the content to be more intuitive, concise, and approachable. To communicate the organization’s mission quickly and memorably, we replaced the site’s acronymic URL with ChooseRestaurants.org and created a new logo.
Building on the new brand voice and style established with the website, NRAEF then asked for a set of collateral pieces to enlist the aid of potential corporate partners and donors. Restaurant careers are more than cooking and serving food, so our challenge was to balance culinary imagery with visuals from “behind the scenes.” Tapping into NRAEF’s wealth of industry data for inspiration, we arrived at a visual solution: a twist on classic, restaurant-style tabletop photography, using a mix of culinary and business elements to visualize key industry statistics.
“Our job is to show Americans what opportunity looks like in the restaurant industry.”
