Fresh Bites: Cooking at Essex Street Market
Fresh Bites is a community cooking program hosted at Essex Street Market in New York City. The visual identity system includes illustrated produce, posters, recipe cards, and environmental graphics designed to support food education and cultural storytelling.
Community Education Program
Brand System · Illustration · Environmental Graphics
Fresh Bites was a cooking + nutrition program at Essex Street Market. I designed a scalable identity system built around a modular library of produce illustrations, used across posters, recipe cards, and large-format market graphics.
Logo by Creative Director Nina LoSchiavo.
Client: Essex Street Market (via Lower East Side Partnership)
Outputs: posters, recipe cards, postcards, environmental cutouts
Focus: consistent system across changing classes + months
A modular illustration library built to scale from icons to large-format installs.
Illustration System
A modular illustration system was created to represent fruits, vegetables, and pantry ingredients used throughout the program.
The illustrations were designed to function as a flexible visual language across multiple formats. Each ingredient could appear independently, combine with others in recipe compositions, or scale into larger environmental graphics throughout the market.
The system allowed the program to quickly produce new materials while maintaining a consistent visual identity.
Each ingredient was drawn to work alone, in pattern, or inside poster compositions. This made it easy to build new event materials without redesigning the style every time. This created a food illustration system.
Poster system
Bilingual cooking demonstration posters system built for quick updates and consistent recognition inside the Essex Street Market.
Educational materials
Recipe cards and worksheet templates for a community cooking program designed for take-home learning.
Seasonal palette approach tied each event’s visuals to its featured dish.
Merch / playful extensions
Lightweight applications that extended the voice of the program beyond signage. Reinforcing the Lower East Side food culture
The Fresh Bites program at Essex Street Market demonstrates how illustration, community programming, and educational design can work together to support local food culture.
Phase 1 — Live demos
Guest chefs and community storytellers introduced recipes and cultural food traditions to market shoppers.
Phase 2 — City-funded program
Expanded into free, recurring classes for LES residents, requiring a more scalable toolkit of posters, templates, and educational materials.
Related Work from
the Lower East Side Partnership
Essex Street Market History Exhibition