Hi, I’m Fernanda.
I built Branding Feast because the skills I'd spent two decades sharpening for the biggest food and drink companies in the world turned out to be exactly what one founder needed to launch hers.
I started wondering what those same skills could do for the people actually building the restaurants, wine shops, and small food businesses I cared about.
It turned out: a lot.
I didn't grow up dreaming of advertising. I came out of university not knowing what to do, took an agency job because I liked the idea of getting paid to be creative, and somehow stayed.
Most of those years were spent inside food and drink: Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, McDonald's, Heineken, Jack Daniel's, Glenlivet, Bacardi. Some of it wasn't food — Nike, Lexus, Meta — but the work I loved most was always the work tied to what people eat, drink, and gather around.
I learned how to build brands at the scale of the entire category.
How to make a single decision that would land in fifty markets at once.
How to defend a color, a word, a piece of typography against every kind of stakeholder pressure, until one version survived fifteen opinions and twelve rounds of focus groups and went on to live on a billion shelves.
Those are real skills that founders in the food and hospitality world should have access to.
Why I started Branding Feast
I always loved restaurants more than boardrooms. The small wine shops, the neighborhood bakeries, the chef opening her first place after a decade in someone else's kitchen. The people doing the actual work of making food culture were the ones I most wanted to help, and they were the ones who couldn't afford the agencies I worked for.
I took one independent assignment to keep the lights on between jobs. The skills I'd spent years sharpening for companies that owned the world turned out to be exactly what one founder needed to launch her brand. After all that work that disappeared into committees, this one mattered.
So I kept going. I built Branding Feast around the idea that the founder of a wine bar in Brooklyn or a chef opening her first restaurant deserves the same strategic rigor that goes into a global beverage launch.
For founders who already know the difference
Most of my clients didn't come to me first. They tried it themselves. They opened Canva. They prompted ChatGPT. They watched the YouTube tutorials and patched together something that worked well enough to launch.
That's not failure. That's how every smart founder starts. You don't hire someone for the brand until you're sure the business is real, and the only way to be sure the business is real is to run it for a while with the brand you could make yourself.
But there's a moment where you stop having time for it. The business gets bigger. The decisions get more expensive. You're presenting to investors, or pitching a wholesale buyer, or watching a competitor enter your space, and the DIY version isn't carrying its weight anymore. You could keep going. You could spend another weekend with another AI tool. But you have bigger fish to fry, and somewhere along the way you learned that there's a difference between something that looks like a brand and something that is one.
That's when people call me.
Not because they couldn't do it themselves.
They already did.
Because they're ready for the next version.
About me
I once sold my car to fund a trip to Spain because I wanted to eat Spanish food. I would do it again.
The truth is, my clearest memory of every place I've lived (Brazil, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and now London) is something I ate there.
Today, I walk my dog Ollie past fourteen different cuisines all in one morning. London might be the best food city in the world. (Or Osaka? Or San Sebastián? I think about this way too much.)
If you've made it this far and any of this sounds like the kind of person you want building your brand, let's talk.
The first step is a Fit Call: fifteen minutes on Zoom, no pressure, just to see if we're a match.