Logo Competition - Update for Honeyville Grain

The Company: "Over the years Honeyville Grain has grown and expanded into Honeyville Food Products, Inc. The company, still family owned and operated, follows the actions of it's founder Lowell Sherratt, Sr. by treating people with respect, fairness, and integrity. Today, with more than 60 years of experience in Food Product Formulation & Design/Dry Food Blending/Packaging for Retail Sale, we recognize more clearly than ever that our continued success must be built upon relationships of trust with our valued customers. The philosophy of treating people as we would like to be treated still stands as a cornerstone of our corporate vision. People can make a difference."
- from their project brief 

The Project: interpretation of the current, classic logo; slightly modern twist

The Prize: Normally I don't mention this in the blog post, but this time I thought it was worth a couple lines of text.  The prize is: $2,159!!!

My Thought Process:

The Original Logo (on their website the text is dark brown)

I did not want to stray too far from the current logo because I wanted the new logo to be recognizable to previous customers (kind of like wearing makeup; you want to enhance what is good but not make the person [logo] unrecognizable).

I had first thought to make a seal/emblem similar to the Gold Medal flour logo, but then decided this was too far form the original logo.

The final design I decided to go with, incorporated the grain into the text.  I think this makes the logo look more 'custom-made' and less like someone took a clipart image of wheat and placed some text over it.

Video Tutorial - Logo Design for Optimum Health Medical Gorup

Here is my very first video tutorial. Please forgive my rambling :)

This logo design contest is on a different website than my normal designcontest.com because I was directed to this contest by my friend Calen!