award of merit
jg@sukle.com
Wild Oats was organic before organic had its own grocery aisle. In the 1990s, the brand helped launch the natural foods movement—championing accessible organic products when most Americans had never heard the term. Then a major competitor acquired Wild Oats, and the name all but vanished.
When grocery distributor KeHE purchased the intellectual property, they brought the challenge to Sukle: bring Wild Oats back to life. Not as a nostalgia play. As a brand with something to say about what has happened to the American food system since Wild Oats was forced off the shelf.
Sukle did what Sukle does: started with the people closest to the truth. One-on-one conversations with founding-era Wild Oats employees revealed something the agency was not expecting. These were not wistful retirees looking back fondly. They were angry. Furious, actually, at what had happened to the food system they had spent their careers trying to fix—the industrialization, the greenwashing, the widening gap between what labels promise and what farming practices deliver.
That righteous anger fueled the new brand. Sukle rebuilt Wild Oats as a modern food activist under the positioning "Mad About Food"—a brand built for consumers who love food and share the founders' conviction that the food system is broken and that buying differently is a form of protest. The visual identity matches the temperature. Where every other brand on the natural foods shelf reaches for earthy greens and pastoral tans, Wild Oats screams from the shelf in “Raging Red.” It is designed to be unmissable—a beacon in every aisle as the brand expands into new categories. Sukle’s design earned coverage in Graphic Design USA and Roastbrief; the brand launch and strategy was featured in Food Dive, Grocery Dive, and Nosh.
Wild Oats' first Regenerative Organic Certified products—cold-pressed juices, smoothies, and eggs—roll into natural and organic grocers mid-2026. It is the first brand to offer ROC-certified juices and smoothies in the category. Pre-launch testing with Sprouts Farmers Market shoppers showed twice as many consumers preferred Wild Oats juices over Suja and Evolution when shown packages side by side. And Wild Oats eggs ranked first in packaging appeal against Vital Farms and Happy Egg.
A 15-person agency in Denver does not usually build a nationally distributed CPG brand from IP acquisition through strategy, identity, packaging, and launch. But this is the kind of assignment that finds Sukle—one that requires sitting with real people, listening for the emotional truth, rejecting the safe creative choices, and building a brand around a conviction rather than a consumer insight. ROC-certified is the newest, highest standard in the natural foods movement - and Wild Oats is betting the regenerative farm on it.
