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Merma printed pieces on a coral surface: a crimson poster with concentric beetroot rings, a bone poster with the trimmed wordmark, a menu, coasters and a matchbox.

“Merma” is kitchen slang for what's lost in preparation. Here it's the whole menu.

Industry
Restaurants
Year
2026
Services
Brand identity, Print, Mobile web
Status
Concept

Studio concept. Merma is a fictional restaurant invented for this study. It isn't a client, and the imagery was rendered by the studio.

Overview

Merma is an imagined zero-waste restaurant: rinds, stems, bones and yesterday's bread, cooked seriously. The risk with this kind of concept is the brand turning worthy and beige. This one needed appetite, and a sense of humour about itself.

Challenge

Sustainable restaurant brands usually look apologetic: recycled-paper textures, muted greens, lowercase whispers. Meanwhile the menu changes daily, so anything printed goes out of date by tomorrow.

Objectives

  • Make waste look delicious rather than virtuous
  • Build an identity that's cheap to run in-house
  • Publish a daily menu without a designer or a developer
Three Merma posters pasted in a row on a pale wall, alternating beetroot rings and the trimmed wordmark.

Strategy & direction

Treat the wordmark the way the kitchen treats a vegetable. It gets trimmed, and the trim is the identity.

  • The cut

    A heavy, generous serif sliced flat along the baseline. Nothing is added: the logo is made by taking some away.

  • The ring

    The cross-section of a beetroot, drawn like a linocut, gives the brand a pattern anyone can print with one colour.

  • The colour

    Beetroot, tomato and bone. Colours that come from the kitchen rather than from a sustainability report.

Live prototype

Design & development

The menu is the product, and most people read it on a phone at the table. So the mobile site does one thing well: today's dishes, filterable by what you can't eat, updated by the chef from a simple form. Try it below.

merma

TodayWhat came in this morning

  • Cheese rind, toasted

    Rinds from the counter

  • Chard stems, black butter

    Stems the market leaves behind

  • Prawn heads, rice

    Heads from Tuesday's lunch

  • Beet leaves, egg

    Leaves from the beetroot crates

  • Yesterday's bread, today's coffee

    Stale loaves, soaked overnight

Deliverables

  • Wordmark and pattern system
  • Poster series
  • Menus and coasters
  • Matchboxes and packaging
  • Mobile-first menu site

Outcomes

This is a concept, so there are no results to report. We don't invent numbers. When a commissioned project goes here, you'll see verified outcomes and where they came from.

Close view of Merma coasters and a matchbox, with the bottom of each wordmark sliced off in a straight line.

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