The new owner of Select Food Products wanted to modify the labels for their range of sauces and condiments to reflect new packaging regulations. Rather than simply update the tired legacy labels that came along with the business, they engaged us to explore how they could be updated and improved.

We conducted an extensive design exploration informed by a competitive audit, discussions with the internal team, and their print suppliers. The outcome was a recommendation that Select adopt a completely new, more efficient and differentiated design system, one that would better reflect how the needs of foodservice customers differ from retail consumers, be easier for their customers to use in a fast-paced working environment, and speed time-to-market for new and updated products.

Our design strategy shifted away from an unproductive retail-style approach. The new system emphasizes the product name through strong, characterful typography to distinguish offerings within product lines. We reduced the focus on ambiguous, repetitive, colour illustrations and instead enlisted monochromatic photographic images to act as category “icons”. The revised colour palette is now more powerful and coordinated.

The successful result is an attractive, distinctive, and highly practical label design system that is more appropriate to the customers and simpler and faster to produce.