Sofi

Sofi is a bakery located in Berlin’s Sophienhöfe. Opened in 2020, the shop is the result of a cooperation between the Slow collective and Danish chef Frederik Bille Brahe: Sofi aims at finding back the flavors of ancient grains, with an attention given to the quality of soils. The bakery offers a wide range of bread varieties and a selection of cakes, cookies and pastries, typically from Germany and Denmark, with some incursions into other international specialties. Sofi’s position is to defend a vision of bakery as craft, a vision nowadays altered by the industrialization of these products.

For their identity, Sofi chose simplicity, with a logotype in condensed sans-serif letters. It’s a good match for the facade of the brick building it decided to settle in. Their single-page website follows the same path, with the sections in different natural colors, a short description of their philosophy, and beautiful pictures. The latter show as much the products as the interior of the shop, designed by the architects Mathias Mentez and Alexander Vedel Ottensten. The attention to detail expressed in their practice of bakery extends to the typographic choices: Neue Haas Grotesk from Commercial Type for text and Cardinal Fruit from Production Type for titles. While Neue Haas is a radical grotesque that has a purity in design rarely found in other typefaces of the same kind, Cardinal Fruit used in italics brings sophistication to the bakery’s identity, its swift rhythm being at the same time a sort of signature. This typographic association sums up the will of the company: going back to the essence of a craft and re-think it with the vision of a chef.