Movement to Organize for restaurant equity
*More is more

MORE, or the Movement to Organize for Restaurant Equity, set out to do something the restaurant industry had never managed: organize itself.

Despite being the second-largest employer in the country—15 million people across more than a million mostly small, independent businesses generating nearly $900 billion in sales—the industry operates not as a bloc but as an unconnected network of siloed operators, leaving its workforce exposed to low wages, instability, and harassment, and, post-pandemic, an accelerating slide toward closures, consolidation, and chain-ification.

The strategic challenge was to convert that fragmentation into collective power—and to do it by moving the one group with the leverage to force change: diners. The insight reframed an everyday act as something bigger, drawing a line between "eating" and "dining"—dining as social fabric, common ground, a home away from home—and leaned on a disarming fact: roughly half of all American adults have worked in a restaurant at some point, a vast reservoir of latent empathy waiting to be tapped. The conclusion was to celebrate an economy that is "small at scale," a diverse collective united by cause.

The resulting strategy was built to "feel like a movement and read like a plan," anchored to one galvanizing belief—that More is More—which became the organization's name and rallying cry: a movement to relentlessly champion more choice, recognition, value, protection, and diversity across the dining ecosystem.

It gave that movement a memorable brand idea in Tough Mother—the modern matriarch of John Paul Lederach's "critical yeast," strength strategically applied, warm and wise but unyielding, a "first lady of food" hellbent on generating growth for the industry.

The effort turned a scattered, invisible workforce into a coalition with a name, a face, a plan, and undeniable clout.

Creative Partner—BASE

[Brand Strategy, Naming, Copywriting]