The Rebranding Dilemma: When Your Name Doesn't Fit Your Vision

"Buen Provecho" translates to "have a good meal" in Spanish—a perfect name for a food waste marketplace. But what happens when your vision expands beyond food to cosmetics, household products, and other categories? Do you rebrand and sacrifice years of equity you've built, or do you launch separate brands and manage multiple identities?

On the Levels Podcast, Guillermo Martinez, COO and co-founder of Buen Provecho, openly discussed this dilemma they're facing as they plan to expand beyond food waste into other product categories where surplus and waste create similar opportunities.

The Name That Works Too Well

Buen Provecho started with a clear, focused mission: reduce food waste by connecting surplus food from stores to consumers. The name perfectly captured this mission. When someone in Latin America says "buen provecho," they're wishing you a good meal—it's culturally embedded and instantly communicates that the app is about food.

This clarity helped with early adoption. Users immediately understood what the app did. Store partners got it right away. Press coverage didn't require lengthy explanations. The name did a lot of heavy lifting in communicating the value proposition.

But as the team looks toward the future, that clarity becomes a constraint. Their core mission has always been broader than just food.

"Our core goal is to reduce waste in general. And we think that food waste is the low-hanging fruit, so we started there."

Food waste was the starting point because it's visible, measurable, and the infrastructure required to address it (pickup from stores) was relatively straightforward. But the same dynamics that create food waste exist across numerous industries.

The Cosmetics Opportunity

Cosmetics represent an obvious next category for expansion. Like food, cosmetic products have expiration dates even though they remain safe and effective long after retailers stop accepting them for sale.

"For example, we're thinking about like cosmetics, right? Everything that touches humans needs to have an expiration date. And like big companies like L'Oreal, for example, for a lot of their products."

The parallel to food is striking. Manufacturers and distributors have perfectly good cosmetic products with months of shelf life remaining that retailers won't accept. Rather than waste these products, they could flow through the same kind of marketplace model that Buen Provecho built for food.

The infrastructure requirements are similar. Stores or distribution centers in cities where consumers can pick up products. A platform connecting supply with demand. Quality control and verification to ensure products are legitimate and safe. Marketing that emphasizes waste reduction and value rather than "cheap" positioning to protect brand partnerships, just as they do with food brands.

But "Buen Provecho" doesn't work for cosmetics. The name creates cognitive dissonance. Users would be confused about why a food app is selling makeup. Stores and cosmetic brands would question whether the platform understands their category. The brand equity built in food doesn't transfer cleanly to an unrelated category.

The Strategic Options

Buen Provecho faces three basic paths forward, each with significant trade-offs.

The first option is maintaining the current brand and expanding its meaning. They could keep the Buen Provecho name and simply start offering cosmetics alongside food. Over time, users would learn that Buen Provecho means "surplus products at a discount" rather than specifically food. This preserves all their existing brand equity and keeps the operation simple with one platform, one marketing engine, and one community.

The downside is substantial confusion during the transition. Existing users who think of Buen Provecho as their food waste app will be surprised to see lipstick and shampoo. The name will always have food associations that need to be overcome when entering new categories. And the brand positioning becomes diluted—are they the food waste app, the surplus products app, or something else entirely?

The second option is launching separate brands for each category. Buen Provecho stays focused on food. A new brand with a new name handles cosmetics. Perhaps another brand for household products. Each has its own identity, clear positioning, and category-specific marketing.

This approach maintains clarity and allows each brand to build authentic relationships within its category. Cosmetics industry partners don't need to understand the food waste model—they just engage with a brand focused on cosmetic surplus. The challenge is operational complexity. Multiple brands mean multiple marketing efforts, multiple communities to build, and confusion about the relationship between brands. Do users who love Buen Provecho for food know to check the cosmetics brand? Does the company benefit from network effects across categories, or are they essentially starting from scratch each time?

The third option is rebranding everything under a broader name. Pick a name that works across all waste reduction categories, migrate existing users, and build future expansion under a unified brand that can stretch across products.

This creates the most future flexibility and the clearest long-term brand position. But rebranding is expensive and risky. All the brand equity, top-of-mind awareness, and cultural meaning built around Buen Provecho would need to be rebuilt under a new name.

"Obviously that's something we haven't come to terms yet, haven't decided, but yeah, it's on the table."

The Brand Equity Problem

Guillermo emphasized the amount of investment they've made in building the Buen Provecho brand specifically.

"We have spent so much in just building that top of mind that just changing it seems like shooting us in the leg."

This isn't just about logo design and visual identity. Brand equity includes name recognition among consumers and stores, trust built through thousands of successful transactions, word-of-mouth awareness where satisfied users tell friends to try Buen Provecho, media coverage and press mentions that have established credibility, cultural association with waste reduction and sustainable shopping, and SEO value where people search specifically for Buen Provecho.

Throwing all of that away to rebrand is painful. Even with the best migration strategy, some users will be lost. Some stores won't make the transition. Some brand value will simply evaporate during the changeover.

This is why many successful companies end up with names that don't perfectly match what they do. Amazon started selling books but the name worked for everything. Google became a verb even though the name is essentially meaningless. Apple makes computers and phones, not fruit. Sometimes the brand equity matters more than the name's literal meaning.

But there's a difference between a name that's abstract or meaningless versus a name that actively points to the wrong category. Amazon could mean anything. Buen Provecho specifically means food. That's a harder gap to bridge.

Learning From Other Category Expansions

Other companies have navigated similar transitions with mixed results. Some maintained their original name despite expanding beyond the original category, like how Amazon kept its name when moving from books to everything, or how Netflix kept its name despite shifting from DVD-by-mail to streaming. The brand was strong enough that consumers accepted the evolution.

Others launched separate brands for different categories, such as how Meta (formerly Facebook) kept Facebook as the social network but launched Instagram and WhatsApp as separate brands for different social use cases, or how Alphabet was created as the parent company with Google remaining focused on search while other ventures operated independently.

And some went through full rebrands when their name became constraining, like how The Facebook became Facebook when it expanded beyond colleges, or Research In Motion became BlackBerry when the phone brand became more valuable than the corporate identity.

Each approach worked in specific contexts. The right answer depends on how much the current name constrains growth versus how much equity exists in the current brand, how closely related the new categories are to the original category, and whether the company can afford the cost and risk of rebranding or managing multiple brands.

The Operational Reality

Beyond the strategic and branding questions, there's a practical constraint that Guillermo acknowledged.

"So that's like ideas that we have kind of like validated, but we need at least also to be focused, like we're a startup. So we have like a main engine, but we need more resources to start, know, okay, let's do these sort of things."

Right now, Buen Provecho is focused on expanding their distributor model with dark stores to unlock more food waste reduction. That initiative requires significant capital and operational focus. Adding cosmetics on top of that would strain resources and divide attention.

The rebranding question is somewhat academic until they're ready to actually launch a second category. At that point, the decision becomes urgent and the trade-offs become concrete rather than theoretical. For now, they can explore the strategic options while maintaining focus on executing their current roadmap.

This disciplined approach to expansion prevents the common startup mistake of trying to do too much too fast. They learned this lesson from their Colombia expansion challenges—better to execute one thing well than to half-execute multiple initiatives simultaneously.

The User Perspective

While the team debates strategic options, there's a simpler question: what do users actually want?

Users who love Buen Provecho for food might be delighted to discover they can also get discounted cosmetics through the same app they already use. The convenience of one platform, one account, and one community could outweigh any confusion about the name. Or users might prefer category-specific apps where they know exactly what they'll find when they open it—food in one app, cosmetics in another.

This could be resolved through user research, asking existing users how they'd feel about category expansion. Do they want Buen Provecho to expand into other categories? Would they be confused or excited? Would they prefer separate apps for different product types?

The answer likely varies by user segment. Power users who are deeply engaged with the waste reduction mission might love seeing the platform expand into multiple categories—it reinforces that the mission is bigger than food. Casual users who primarily care about discounted food might prefer keeping things focused and simple.

Building engagement features around category expansion could help with the transition. If users have achievements for trying different product categories or points that work across all categories, it reinforces that expansion serves the broader mission rather than diluting the brand.

The Future Vision

Regardless of which path they choose, the vision is clear: become a platform for waste reduction across multiple consumer categories, not just food.

The infrastructure they're building—the technology platform, the supplier relationships, the consumer community, the logistics capabilities—can serve multiple waste reduction use cases. Each new category leverages existing capabilities while expanding the addressable market.

Whether that happens under the Buen Provecho brand, under separate brands, or under a new unified brand is a question they'll need to answer soon. But the strategic direction is set: expand the mission of waste reduction beyond food while maintaining the core values and approach that made them successful in their initial category.

Key Takeaways

• Strong brand names can become constraints when they're too specific to the original category and expansion plans require broader positioning
• Rebranding sacrifices hard-earned equity including name recognition, trust, and cultural associations built over years
• Multiple brands create operational complexity requiring separate marketing, communities, and potentially confusing users about relationships
• Category expansion timing matters as trying to expand before mastering the core business divides focus and resources
• User research can inform the decision by understanding whether customers want category expansion within existing brands or prefer focused, category-specific platforms

Listen to the full conversation with Guillermo Martinez on the Levels Podcast to hear more about navigating growth challenges and making strategic decisions about brand evolution.