New Name, Logo System, and Identity for Southbound Food Festival by Matey

Southbound Food Festival, formerly known as Birmingham Food + Culture Festival (shortened publicly to “Food+”), is an annual ten-day culinary event held each summer in Birmingham, AL, since 2023. For this year’s edition, the festival underwent a full renaming and rebrand led by Birmingham-based agency Matey, following a strategic reassessment of the limitations of the previous name and identity system. This rebrand marks a shift away from the digital, ambiguous, and sometimes hard-to-pronounce qualities associated with the “Food+” name and its inconsistent visual execution. In its place, “Southbound” establishes a more distinctive, geographically grounded, and broadly welcoming platform designed to better reflect the region’s culinary culture and to create a recognizable, sayable identity