Fresh Thyme Market
Fresh Thyme Market is a Midwest grocer built around a simple, stubborn belief: food should have a pulse. From the beginning, the brand centered itself on produce, not as decoration, but as the backbone of the store and the soul of the experience. Clean ingredients, honest pricing, and real relationships with local farmers created a place that sat comfortably between conventional grocery and high-end natural chains. Forty percent of the floor is fruits and vegetables because that’s where the story starts, and where trust is earned.
While the agency had stewarded the relationship for five to six years, I spent more than two of those years deeply embedded in the Fresh Thyme account, shaping how the brand showed up in the world. We touched nearly every channel, from TV and video to digital, in-store, and out-of-home, with a focus on consistency, clarity, and restraint. The goal wasn’t volume, it was coherence. Work that respected the craft behind the food, the intelligence of the customer, and the idea that strong fundamentals don’t need to shout to be felt.
“Produce is Our Passion” was our way back to that truth. We told the stories of buyers and farmers who treat vegetables like craft, not commodities, and showed customers the raw, unapologetic beauty of fresh, local food. Dirt still on the roots. Color that doesn’t need a filter. Possibility piled high in wooden crates. Across print, digital, and in-store, the campaign reminded people that great meals don’t start with a coupon, they start with care. And when you open the door to truly gorgeous produce, you don’t just buy dinner. You cook. You linger. You remember why food mattered in the first place.
Produce is our Passion
Performance marketing has a way of sanding the soul off a brand. At Fresh Thyme, the pursuit of clicks and promos had slowly turned a place built on food into a sea of little yellow and red price tags, loud, transactional, forgettable. So we stopped optimizing and started listening. Not to dashboards, but to the people who actually touch the food. The produce buyers. The ones who wake up early, shake hands with farmers, and know exactly which tomato is worth arguing for. What they told us was simple and quietly radical: produce isn’t inventory. It’s a way of life. A belief system. Something you respect before you sell it.
How do you
This campaign romanticized ingredients without stylizing life. Food shot the way people actually live with it. Meals shared with friends, with family, or standing alone at the counter after a long day. We treated cooking as a human act, not a lifestyle flex, making the work feel candid, relatable, and lived-in across print, digital, and in-store. The result was an invitation, not an instruction manual. Start with something beautiful. Trust yourself. And remember that the best meals aren’t about perfection, they’re about connection.
Fresh Thyme Market’s “Produce Is Our Passion” earned its place by restoring soul to the department that built the brand. A year later, the idea naturally evolved into something more intimate. “Ingredients That Inspire” shifted the focus from sourcing to what happens next. Not the performance of cooking, but the pleasure of it. The quiet joy of good olive oil hitting a hot pan. The confidence that comes from starting with ingredients that don’t need help pretending to be something else.
Celebrate Deliciously
Fresh Thyme Market’s holiday campaign, “Celebrate Deliciously,” was built on a simple truth: the holidays don’t belong to one recipe, one table, or one tradition. They belong to whoever is cooking. Whether it’s a perfectly practiced family classic or a last-minute experiment born from curiosity and wine, the joy lives in the making. The campaign positioned Fresh Thyme as the place where every tradition, old or newly invented, starts with ingredients worth showing up for.
Rather than prescribe how the holidays should look, the work celebrated how they actually feel. Busy kitchens, crowded counters, mismatched chairs, meals made with care instead of perfection. Across digital, print, and in-store, we focused on the pleasure of choosing great ingredients and trusting they’ll carry the meal. “Celebrate Deliciously” wasn’t about the perfect spread. It was about creating something meaningful and sharing it with whoever’s there.
It’s Thyme
Research into modern dinner routines showed that a huge share of Americans don’t commit to what they’ll cook until it’s almost time to eat, a pattern that reflects broader indecision about meals and a desire for inspiration rather than obligation. Surveys show most people decide what they’ll eat on the same day, often hours before dinner, and that choosing meals is a common stress point for consumers who juggle time, energy, and options every evening. With that insight, “It’s Thyme” became more than a slogan — it became a gentle, helpful reminder in a moment of decision fatigue, showing up where people needed it most: during their daily routines and physical journeys.
The campaign planted ideas in the places people see during their commute and at the grocery threshold, inspiring dinner plans before the question ever became urgent. Out-of-home, transit, and digital placements offered quick recipe suggestions that felt like a friend nudging you toward something simple and delicious. Once inside Fresh Thyme stores, cues continued so that if you walked in without a plan, the produce, pantry pairings, and easy ideas were right there — earnestly helpful, not prescriptive. Across every touchpoint, “It’s Thyme” was rooted in understanding that inspiration makes dinner easier, and that relevancy at the right moment is half the battle of getting good food on the table.
