Lore

Food for the Southern Soul

Food for the Southern Soul. Does that sound delicious or what? This local brand produces mouth-watering spices, marinades, cane syrup as well as ready-to-eat foods like benne wafers, pickled okra and vegetable soup. It’s the easiest way to get your grandmother’s cooking delivered to your house or right off the grocery shelves.

Within the Food for the Southern Soul brand, there’s the Charleston Favorites food products, BlackJack Barbecue sauces and spices, and Lavington Farms heirloom rice and old-school cane syrup. Oh, and an award winning barbecue team that has dazzled the likes of the James Beard House, presidential dinners and, more than likely, party guests in your neighbor’s backyard.

All the good stuff. All under Food for the Southern Soul.

Between their culinary accolades and well known packaging, it was high time for Food for the Southern Soul to have a website that met the high demand of their products.

Our goals for this website

  1. Make you hungry.
  2. Show the breadth of products.
  3. Tell their brand story (it’s one of those motivational quit-your-day-job-and-do-what-you-love stories).
  4. Integrate their social channels.

Make You Hungry.

We pulled in Peter Frank Edwards Photography for a full day shoot out in (my favorite place on earth) Rockville, South Carolina. The recipe was there: mouth-watering food, the Executive Pitmaster / Founder (Jimmy Hagood), waterside hammock, short dock, cute kids and a happy-tear-worthy puppy. A real live puppy. Sensory overload.

We let the imagery and brand story drive the design and the results are pretty awesome.

Starting the story with the carousel of hero images.

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Show the breadth of products.

A carousel with the top-selling products was placed near the top of the page directly users straight to the product pages to purchase.

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Tell their brand story

On the home page, we placed an Our Story teaser with a preview of the press Food for the Southern Soul has received.

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We ended the home page with another teaser for the store, catering and their barbecue “cue-osk”.

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And lastly, social feeds.

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Our Story page

Since Jimmy and his wife Anne Marie (Chief Emotional Officer) decided to keep their existing catering process and ecommerce as-is for now, the only interior page we needed was a place to continue their origin story and show off the ridiculously good press they’ve received over the years.

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For the first time since they’ve launched their digital presence, we have Google Analytics tracking user sessions, returning vs. new users, etc.

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We are excited to see Food for the Southern Soul continue to grow and expand their product lines.