Call for Papers
Food Branding.
Trends and resistances of taste
edited by Dario Mangano, Davide Puca and Ilaria Ventura Bordenca (University of Palermo)
In an age of superfoods and “transparent” supply chains, territorial labels and sustainability seals, food – with its circuits of production, trade and consumption – stands out as one of today’s most powerful engines of meaning. Around food practices take shape identity narratives and commercial imaginaries, ethical conflicts, aesthetics of consumption and new forms of citizenship. Anthropology, food history and semiotics have long shown that eating is never just nourishment – nor merely a matter of taste. It is a way of taking a stance within a world of values, of deciding how one inhabits the earth, the body and collective life.
Food branding is no longer a simple marker of commercial recognition or a guarantee of quality. It is a discursive instance, encoded in specific communicative genres, that gives shape and duration to the lived experience of food. Brands interpret the tensions of contemporary food culture – local vs global, fast vs slow, artisanal vs industrial, natural vs technological – and translate them into strategies of signification. Through texts, images, environments and practices, brands establish modes of alimentary existence and define key social stakes: what counts as edible, desirable, authentic, healthy, ethical, typical, “Italian”, and so on.
Over the past decades, food semiotics has formed a broad and multilayered field in which food appears as an eminently discursive object, a system of practices, texts and mediations that produces meanings, social values and forms of life. Research has shown how food cultures emerge from the interplay of heterogeneous languages that converge precisely around branding – ranging from traditional media to social networks, from restaurants to packaging.
Within this framework, visual identities in the agri-food sector offer a crucial vantage point: emblems that condense cultural values and models of belonging, turning the brand into a device of narrative coherence (Marrone). In the realm of food advertising, semiotic studies have shown how advertising operates as a laboratory for articulating the cultural values of food (Mangano). Campaigns do not merely present products: they construct templates of everyday life, organise value regimes – simplicity/abundance, care/efficiency, intimacy/convenience – and translate elementary practices such as cooking or serving into meaningful micro-rituals. Food advertising thus becomes a language through which brands orient perceptions, expectations and behaviours, inscribing food within shared narratives and mythologies.
Following this trajectory, research on spaces and formats of consumption has highlighted how the restaurant – whether a metropolitan bistro or fine-dining venue – is as a complex semiotic device (Giannitrapani), articulating values, postures and ritualities of gastronomic experience. With the growth of digital media, attention has shifted to online food narratives, where blogs, social platforms and content ecosystems generate specific forms of brand visibility, from recommendation to reputation and endorsement (Mangiapane). Here, food becomes an object of public negotiation: users assume authorial and curatorial roles, and the construction of food value is distributed across brand strategies and diffuse enunciations.
Another significant field concerns local food (often framed as ‘typical’) and its forms of branding and certification. From geographical indications to collective marks, from narratives of origin to heritage practices, the agri-food space becomes a catalyst for authenticity and cultural legitimacy (Puca). In this horizon, food branding does not simply “tell” territories but politically redefines their modes of existence through food.
Finally, food packaging and health-oriented branding have become well-established areas of study. Packaging – both tactile and visual interface – strategically structures the user’s relation with the product, materialising values such as naturalness, safety and functionality (Ventura Bordenca). Such mechanisms become even more evident when analysed through the spaces of modern distribution, veritable theatres of the brand. Research in dietetics has shown how diets themselves may function as brands that mediate bodily experience, scientific knowledge, moral expectations and promises of wellbeing.
Across these perspectives, the semiotics of food branding does not coincide with the application of structuralist models to marketing. It emerges instead as an autonomous theoretical and analytical field: a locus where practices, imaginaries and cultural devices converge to construct meaning, value and social recognisability.
With this issue, E/C welcomes contributions that critically explore the evolution of these dynamics and investigate the role of branding in shaping contemporary food cultures.
Possible Areas of Research
- Value regimes and emerging trends in food branding
How branding organises and redefines consumption values—naturalness, wellbeing, inclusion, sustainability—and translates sociocultural tensions into coherent systems of promises, experiences and visual languages (Stano 2015). - Discursive strategies, coherence and brand transformation
Studies on the brand as a discursive instance mediating between economy and symbolism (Marrone 2007), with attention to coherence and dissonance across brand texts – logos, packaging, retail, web and social media – and to their diachronic evolution. Genealogies of brand discourse, ruptures, continuities and nostalgic postures (Mangano 2014). - Experiences, spaces and practices of consumption
Restaurants, company museums, supermarkets and gastronomic landscapes as semiotic dispositifs. Within a relational semiotics (Landowski 1989), brandscapes can be read as scenes of interaction and sensory performativity, where actors define themselves through shared practices of tasting, exposure and purchase. - Territories, communities and the mythologies of typicality
From early “Made in Italy” mythologies to contemporary cultural branding, food remains a catalyst for identity narratives and alimentary sovereignisms. Geographical indications and collective marks (PDO, PGI, consortia) reconfigure space and authenticity, intertwining food politics, heritage, territorial branding and experiential tourism (Mangiapane, Puca 2022). Typicality becomes a mythology of the present, where branding plays a central role in constructing autochthony. - The discourse of sustainability: a field in motion
From early “organic” rhetoric to today’s aesthetics of responsibility, sustainable branding offers a privileged observatory on food values. Materials, colours and narratives articulate ecological and political visions, producing new regimes of trust and veridiction (Marrone 2016). Regenerative and ecological transitions continue to reshape branding strategies. - Languages and formats of food communication
From TV commercials to digital marketing, food discourse has undergone profound transformations in its enunciative formats. The rise of food influencers, content creators, immersive platforms and AI-mediated communication calls for new analyses of brand storytelling, visibility regimes and aesthetics of participation.
References
Barthes, R., 1957, Mythologies, Paris, Seuil.
Barthes, R., 1964, “Rhétorique de l’image”, in Communications, 4.
Baudrillard, J., 1974, La société de consommation. Ses mythes, ses structures, Paris, Gallimard.
Boutaud, J.-J., 2005, Le sens gourmand. De la commensalité à l’édulisphère, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Douglas, M., Isherwood, B., 1979, The World of Goods. Towards an Anthropology of Consumption, London, Allen Lane.
Floch, J.-M., 1990, Sémiotique, marketing et communication. Sous les signes, les stratégies, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Floch, J.-M., 1995, Identités visuelles, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Giannitrapani A., Marrone G., 2013, La cucina del senso, Milano, Mimesis.
Holt, D. B., 2004, How Brands Become Icons. The Principles of Cultural Branding, Boston (MA), Harvard Business School Press.
Landowski, E., 1989, La société réfléchie. Essais de socio-sémiotique, Paris, Seuil.
Mangano, D., 2014, “L’anima del commercio alimentare”, in Gianfranco Marrone (ed. by), Buono da pensare. Cultura e comunicazione del gusto, Roma, Carocci, pp. 66-100.
Mangano, D., 2019, Ikea e altre semiosfere. Laboratorio di sociosemiotica, Milano, Mimesis.
Mangiapane, F., Puca, D., 2022, “The intimate relationship between food and place branding: a cultural semiotic approach”, in George Rossolatos (ed. by), Advances in Brand Semiotics & Discourse Analysis, Malaga, Vernon Press, pp. 179-202.
Marrone, G., 2007, Il discorso di marca. Modelli semiotici per il branding, Roma–Bari, Laterza.
Marrone, G., 2016, Semiotica del gusto. Linguaggi della cucina, del cibo, della tavola, Milano–Udine, Mimesis.
Marrone, G. (ed. by, 2014, Buono da pensare. Cultura e comunicazione del gusto, Roma, Carocci.
Montanari, M., 2004, Il cibo come cultura, Roma-Bari, Laterza.
Peverini, P., 2024, “Il brand come entità semiotica: tra politica, cultura, tecnologia”, in Riccardo Finocchi, Paolo Peverini, Franciscu Sedda e Bianca Terracciano (ed. by), Miti galeotti. A intelligenza del resto, pp. 275-279.
Semprini, A. (ed. by), 2003, Lo sguardo sociosemiotico. Comunicazione, marche, media, pubblicità, Milano, FrancoAngeli.
Stano, S., 2015, “Semiotics of food”, in International Handbook of Semiotics, Dordrecht, Springer Netherlands, pp. 647-671.
Ventura Bordenca, I., 2022, Food Packaging. Narrazioni semiotiche e branding alimentare, Milano, FrancoAngeli.
Deadline for abstract submission (max 2,000 characters): 15 January 2026
Notification of acceptance: 20 January 2026
Deadline for full paper submission: 20 March 2026
Publication: June 2026
Papers must not exceed 40,000 characters and must be accompanied by an English abstract of no more than 1,000 characters.
Please send proposals to:
redazione.ec.aiss@gmail.com
dario.mangano@unipa.it
davide.puca@unipa.it
ilaria.venturabordenca@unipa.it
