In the food & formulated industry, packaging design and branding is a business decision that can make or break your first impression with a potential customer. Good branding is a holistic mission – it’s a set of standards for every aspect of a product, from quality and ingredients to typography and artwork.
Identifying the best branding strategy is a subjective decision to a certain extent, but there are concrete strategies that generally determine success. My Private Brand’s Vertex Awards, a global competition for private brand packaging design, judges the best designs of the year based on creativity, marketability, and innovation.
The 2020 Vertex winner, Pams Confectionary, employed a branding strategy based on vibrant pops of color to connote a playful, fun vibe. The company paired this visual effect with a transparent window on the front of the package displaying their product and bold text advertising that the sweets contain no artificial colors or flavors to promote the product’s dedication to natural ingredients.
Other retailers making a lasting impact on consumers include Walmart. Walmart’s Sam’s Choice brand centers its visual strategy on warm tones, modern fonts, and high-quality product images to communicate its focus on providing premier food items to customers.
The packaging also includes text emphasizing the brand’s focus on natural and organic ingredients. Is it time for your private brand to revamp its packaging design strategy? Here are five key imperatives to address in packaging and design:
- Branding – An attractive packaging design is the most important advertising opportunity you have. Ensuring your private brand adheres to well-defined, consistent brand standards across products is key to being memorable, recognizable, and familiar to your consumers.
- Safety – Ultimately, the true functional purpose of packaging is to protect the product during transit and storage. Good packaging enhances product safety by protecting it from damage and contamination. Ensuring products survive their shelf life and meet all pertinent regulations.
- Transparency – Customers increasingly want to know what is in their food and how it was made. Providing maximum transparency into food ingredients and supplier certifications establishes trust between brands and consumers.
- Compliance – Food packaging copy must include a correctly formatted ingredients list, allergen warnings, nutrition fact panels, and validated product claims to win over discerning customers.
- Sustainability – Now more than ever, consumers want confirmation that grocery retailers are committed to ethically sourced and sustainable ingredients and packaging, as well as ethical supplier working practices.
Taking all of these factors into account when developing packaging design helps to ensure your product stands out as a high-quality option among a deluge of others. But redesigning your packaging is not a light lift – after grocery retailers decide how they want their product to look and what they want their packaging to communicate, they’re often told to go back to the drawing board when stakeholders see their first artwork design and packaging mockup.
This roadblock isn’t an artwork management problem. It’s indicative of a siloed process in which packaging design teams lack the vital insight of collaborative decision-making from the start. Inadequate collaboration during the earliest product development phases can lead to bottlenecks down the road. Involving all stakeholders as early as possible to address each imperative of packaging design can help private brands get new packaging to market faster and with fewer headaches.
The Bamboo Rose food & formulation PLM solution ensures grocery retailers can confidently produce new packaging designs quickly without introducing compliance risk. Grocery retailers can leverage the Bamboo Rose platform to collaborate with all stakeholders on product ideas, work closely with suppliers on product specifications and quality, and achieve product transparency on the ingredient level.
The platform also streamlines quality compliance through built-in process automation and real-time access to relevant product and vendor data and incorporates sustainability initiatives into every step of the supply chain, so you and your customers know your brand is high-quality and trustworthy.
Additionally, Bamboo Rose partnered this year with multi-disciplined packaging and sustainability consultancy Sun Strategy to accelerate packaging design and artwork development for private brand products. Uniting Sun Strategy’s consulting services and software capabilities with Bamboo Rose’s PLM and Sourcing applications will integrate packaging design and artwork for private brand products directly into a fluid, automated product development and sourcing workflow.
Ready to take your private brand to the next level? Try the Bamboo Rose platform today.