Toronto agency Broken Heart Love Affair has won new business with MadeGood Foods that will see the agency help the snack brand continue its push into the U.S. market.

The food company, which primarily produces healthy, sustainably sourced snacks, has hired the agency to help it develop a brand platform that will carry it until 2025 and enable it to build a greater profile in the United States, according to Milana Kleidman, brand manager at MadeGood’s parent company, Riverside Natural Foods. The company already has U.S. distribution, but the goal is to further gain and develop its awareness there.

“The intent is for us to develop a new campaign for the Canadian and U.S. market, one that we’d be able to use across regions,” she says. “This is very new for MadeGood. So we wanted to make sure we had the right partners to take us there and forge a more emotional connection with consumers.”

Kleidman says MadeGood selected BHLA for the work because “we felt they understood our vision and what we’re trying to achieve as a business.” As a triple bottom line company, MadeGood is concerned not only with producing healthy products sustainably, but also providing a living wage to its employees and providing benefits to its suppliers.

“One of our core values as an organization is being humble. We actually don’t talk a lot about all of the great things going on in our organization, and we wanted to maintain that authenticity,” she says. “We felt BHLA would be able to respect the boundaries we have in place with the business, but also elevate it in a way that isn’t too showy..”

Jay Chaney, partner and chief strategy officer with BHLA, says that while the brand’s dedication to humility does “create a really interesting challenge,” he says, “it also creates a great opportunity to do something fundamentally different.”

“You don’t have to manufacture love for the product,” explains Chaney. “It’s a fun product. It’s nice, bright and personality-filled. … We’re just finding a way to get more people to become involved with it.”

MadeGood is the latest win for the agency that launched in March of last year, and the latest that will see it developing a brand in the U.S. market after it recently won Internova Travel. BHLA will work with its sister agency, Lifelong Crush, on the assignment, similar to other recently won accounts including the Royal Ontario Museum.

Their work is first expected to appear in market within the next six months, Kleidman says.