Home Sweet Circus
Italian food brand gets complete overhaul with homage to founder’s roots.
Casa Gusto, Italian food purveyor, sets sights on introducing packaging to the market that will make an impact. With 70 Italian food related products in the brand range, this design project presented a colossal challenge. Australian design firm The Creative Method (www.thecreativemethod.com) tackled the extensive project with gusto.
The Italian company established by a father and son team is set on providing quality food products that reflect the unique variety of Italy. Circus themed illustrations are channeled in the packaging design as the creator’s father travelled throughout Italy when in his youth following the circus. “The story/history created a fantastic launching pad for the creative,” says The Creative Method’s Cat Spinelli. “We thought that it was such a lovely story about his travels but it wasn’t actually in the original brief, and we had to dig around for it and push the client harder for something that we could build from.”
The Creative Method found traditional Italian illustrations and commissioned illustrator Gerad Taylor (www.geradtaylor.com) through The Drawing Book Studios (www.drawingbook.com.au) “to bring new characters and poses to life,” says Spinelli. The extensive lineup of packaging “needed to look appealing and reflect quality but also tell a story about the Italian origins,” continues Spinelli. After the brief was provided to Taylor, he set forth performing online research to ensure that the rendering style and tone was correct for the illustrations. When describing the illustrations, Taylor states, “The characters were quite specific, a juggler, a bodybuilder and then the circus ringleader and dancer. They needed to have a defined look and personality appropriate to their characters.”
The penne packaging features a mustached man juggling penne, with the help of die-cuts on paperboard used to reveal the actual pasta shells housed inside the packaging. The same juggler is present in the canned section as well, juggling various beans such as mixed beans, red kidney, borlotti and cannellini. Extra virgin olive oil is housed in a 4-L tin and features the ringleader alongside a dancer, with a red and white striped big top in the background. A swimsuit clad bodybuilder is utilized for several packages including the mineral water label. The infamous circus elephant adorned with garb stands atop a “ball,” a red tomato in canned variety labels.
Taylor explains that the “illustrations were intended to be more generic to cover a range of products.” This enabled the illustrations to be used throughout the diverse product lineup, which includes liquids, solids, fragile and sturdy consumables. But the juggler character is anything but generic. It’s almost a self portrait based on a photo of the illustrator.
Reflecting on collaborating on the Casa Gusto project with The Creative Method, Taylor notes that, “Every now and then as an illustrator a real peach of an assignment comes along that is a pleasure to work on and this was one of those instances!” Taylor was “impressed by the integration of my work into the overall package designs by The Creative Method. Their work took what I had done and lifted it to another level,” adding elements such as the integration of die-cuts and the ability to reuse a handful of illustrations in such a variety of products all the while making them appear specific to each item sets their designs apart.
Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice
Pouch helps make baking a bit sweeter.
Targeting the aspiring baker in all of us, Truvia introduces Truvia Baking Blend, a blend of natural sweetener and sugar with 75% fewer calories per serving than sugar. Housed in a multilayer standup pouch supplied by Dutch Pack International (www.dutchpack.eu), the packaging features a closeable, easy-to-pour spout.
Eelco Blum, business development manager, Truvia reacts to the project, “The goal with the packaging was to let the product itself be put on display. So the clear “windows” are expansive to feature the white crystals,” Available in supermarkets in the U.S., U.K. (planned launch), Italy and France, the convenient Baking Blend doypack (standup pouch) is featured in various forms and product measurements according to nation. Amcor (www.dutchpack.eu) supplies pouches for SKUs distributed in France and Italy.
While tackling the package design project, the Truvia in-house design team wanted to stay true to the brand identity, which, “is built on a principle of clear, elegant design and aesthetics,” explains Blum. This brand identity inspired designers to carry this through into the new packaging style to grab consumers’ attention. An example of the attention to detail rendered by the design team includes the decision to use red recipe imagery to complement the iconic red strawberry used on the front of all Truvia packaging. Staying true to the well established and regarded brand, designers believe the added contrast presents an exquisite balance, “The clean green and white background draws the eye and ties together the entire product portfolio,” says Blum.
Say Cheese
Convenient nutritious snacking is at the heart of this Russian brand.
New Foods developed Syrceedy snack cheese to be a pioneer in all-natural snacking in Russia. The packaged food is a real-cheese snack made of farmer’s milk, rich with minerals and vitamins and traditionally smoked with alder wood. To introduce Russians and consumers in neighboring countries to the Syrceedy concept, New Foods sought out Babich Design and Branding (www.babich.tv) to design packaging that would convey the message of fresh taste and the upmost quality.
The package design timeline was roughly four to six weeks and began with the Babich team coming up with three completely different visual concepts, which was narrowed down to the current design. Emotional and optimistic brand language was applied to the packaging design with help from the “Cheese Heart.” Babich then needed to create distinctive and easily recognizable designs to differentiate the flavors in the product line. Hence the tomato, garlic and lettuce graphics were generated.
The next packaging design element to address was to inform the consumer about the benefits of Syrceedy. A system of icons was created for an easy-to-read descriptor of the all-natural cheeses including: milk quality, composition of minerals and vitamins, and eco-labeling. New Foods comments on the package design process, “Our package at first looked a little bit lost when it had been placed on snack shelves, where active colors traditionally dominate. But when our product occupies a normal block of three to four SKUs, the gain immediately becomes vivid. Against the background of riot of bright ‘synthetic’ snack colors, Syrceedy looks as an alien from another world, which is our benefit, of course.”
With a Side of Play
Simply Sausages relaunches with an eccentric lineup.
Heap’s Simply Sausages, produced by Cranswick Country Foods (U.K.), offers up an unconventional new packaging redesign created by Pearlfisher (www.pearlfisher.com) with sights on establishing a new tone of voice for the renowned sausage brand. Pearlfisher took on the task of returning the Simply Sausages brand to its former glory, created by executive chef and sausage enthusiast Martin Heap.
The heritage of the brand established in Greenwich, and one-of-a-kind intimate feel was addressed in the redesign with an eye kept on the increasingly sophisticated marketplace today. Creative director at Pearlfisher, Natalie Chung comments on the redesign, “We needed to combine various important elements of both Martin and the brand to balance heritage, tradition, expertise and eccentricity with honesty, modernity and vibrancy to take the brand forward.”
Launched in Waitrose stores nationwide (U.K.), the Simply Sausages packaging redesign features quirky illustrations for each variety including: Lethal Lucifer no.666, a fiery Scotch bonnet chilli infused recipe with an amused looking devil sitting atop a vending cart, trident in hand with three smoking sausages speared; The Meaty Italian Job no.14, a recipe with fennel and wine, features an Italian waiter moustache clad lighting a candle on his intimate diner cart; The Pork-a-Leekie no.37, a leek and smoked bacon combination, displays a farmer with a spot of piping hot tea and fresh picked leeks atop his no.37 marked cart just to name a few.
Chung continues, “We used a woodcut style illustration to reflect the authenticity, craft and heritage of the brand but included a quirky element to each illustration depicting an amusing or eccentric pictorial representation of the variant,” The packages appear to have their own personalities, which was the goal for Pearlfisher, “Each pack is also deliberately heavily copy driven and we have created names and language for each of the variants to take people to an evocative place.”
The packages consist of six gourmet pork sausages with an added flair of history per selection. Brand manager at Cranswick Country Foods, producer of Simply Sausages, Vicky Smith comments on the packaging redesign, “The sausage fixture is a crowded space with a strong store label offering, so creating a brand proposition and packaging format with standout is essential but very difficult.” Smith continues, “Pearlfisher really understood the Simply brand and how to tell its rich and unique brand story in an interesting and modern way. The quirky Heaps characters on each pack introduce the products’ creator, gourmet sausage maker Martin Heap and some of his best sausage recipes in a unique and exciting way.”