P&O Cruises:
Evolving an icon of the cruise experience

Before creating anything, we needed to understand the experience from every angle.

We combined P&O Cruises' guest insight with food and consumer trends and competitor benchmarking, before getting onboard ourselves.

Five days aboard Iona gave us the chance to experience the restaurants as guests and get behind the scenes with the teams delivering them - looking at everything from menus, dishes and presentation to service, ingredients and operational delivery.

What became clear was that the foundations were strong. Guests valued recognisable food, great value and attentive service.

The opportunity was to build on those things with greater clarity, modernity and a stronger sense of occasion, not to reinvent them.

From there, we worked collaboratively with the P&O Cruises team to turn that direction into a food offer.

We established a clearer food identity and guiding principles, then rebuilt the menu architecture across Lunch, Dinner, Celebration and Chef's Table.

Familiar favourites sat alongside contemporary new ideas. Menu language and presentation were elevated. Celebration became an opportunity to dial up the sense of occasion. And supplementary dishes were designed around premium ingredients and cookery that could genuinely earn their place as an optional extra.

All of it was designed with the realities of a high-volume cruise operation in mind - from ingredient cross-utilisation and operational simplicity to how dishes could be consistently delivered at scale.

The result? 14 Lunch menus. 14 Dinner menus. Four Celebration menus. One Chef's Table menu. And around 670 dish recommendations.