MorningStar Farms Rebrands Around 52 Years of History, Not Politics

Beyond Meat's stock trades around $8 — down 88% year over year — while its revenue fell 19.7% in 2025. Impossible Foods' CEO says plant-based meat is "not in vogue right now." Into this climate, MorningStar Farms has launched a retro rebrand built on a simple claim: meat alternatives have existed for decades, and they are not going anywhere.

MorningStar was founded in 1974, long before "plant-based" became a supermarket category. Kellogg (now Kellanova) acquired the brand in 1999. This month, working with the agency Design Bridge and Partners, it rolled out new typography, a vibrant green palette and a retro look designed to call back to its heritage and stand out on shelves.

Why is heritage the message?

The category's leaders have tried two opposing design strategies to fix their perception problem:

• In 2024, Impossible Foods debuted a richly red, meatier look. CEO Peter McGuinness said the rebrand aimed to dispel the brand's "elitist," "woke" reputation.
• In 2025, Beyond dropped the "meat" from its name and leaned into a greener, more veggie-forward direction.

MorningStar is taking a third route. The new look sidesteps the culture war entirely — neither projecting meat adjacency nor aggressively playing up its vegetable content. Instead, it amplifies something newer rivals cannot claim: 52 years of continuous business.

"Our initial hunch was, that's a thing that [the brand] can say without flinching," says Ben Sherwood, creative partner at Design Bridge and Partners. "It was an understated truth of the brand that hadn't really been touched on before, but was a point of difference when you look at the rest of the category and the question of nutritional benefits or the fad diet world."

One internal mantra became a guiding principle: "They weren't good because they were old; they were old because they were good."

How did fake meat become a political flashpoint?

A few years ago, the category was an investor darling. Beyond's stock hit an all-time high of $234 in 2019. Three years later, it partnered with McDonald's on the McPlant. Eleven Madison Park in New York had taken meat off its menu entirely, and Impossible reportedly more than doubled its retail sales by the end of 2022.

Today the picture is drastically different. The McPlant is dead in the water. Eleven Madison Park added meat back to its menu at the end of last year. At the Semafor World Economy summit in 2025, Impossible's McGuinness said plant-based meat was "not in vogue right now." The vegan chicken nugget startup Nowadays has ceased operations entirely.

Experts argue meat and meat alternatives have become symbols for right-wing and left-wing viewpoints, respectively, especially since the Make America Healthy Again movement. As Fast Company wrote late last year, "the plant-based world—and the public's desire for bold action for the climate—is in retreat."

What went into the design?

Mosley says the new brand had three main goals:

• Re-center MorningStar's 52-year heritage
• Help shoppers identify benefits they care about, such as taste and protein content
• Make the brand easier to find on shelves

To capture the brand's origins, Sherwood's team went back to the '70s: era-specific playlists, old records and posters, and MorningStar cookbooks from the time. "1974 was post-hippie era, post-Summer of Love [in 1967]," Sherwood says. "There was still a love for this back to nature idea and conscious, healthy living."

A key motif is an illustration system, built in-house at Design Bridge and inspired by '70s woodcut prints. It hides nods to classic MorningStar ingredients — wheat, soy beans, corn kernels. Sherwood calls it the trellis: "this idea that plants are the backdrop of this brand, therefore plants are the backdrop of our design system."

The trellis frames on-pack claims like "since 1974," protein and fat content, and "no animal products or antibiotics." Photographer Stephen Hamilton shot new product imagery that evokes a retro dinner setup — nuggets and chicken parm plated the way your mom might have done it. The typography is Blazeface, a retro serif from Ohno type foundry chosen because it feels both vaguely '70s and sufficiently modern.

The shift also abandons MorningStar's former white, sterile aesthetic. "We did really want to counter this stark white world that they were living in—it was more a functional aesthetic—to get back into something that felt more organic and more real-food-driven," Sherwood says.

Early reactions suggest the rebrand is "helping strengthen brand recognition and shelf navigation," according to Mosley. If it succeeds, it could prove that plant-based meat companies can hold onto customers without playing into the politicization of the category.