five golden rules in foodservice branding and packaging

Traditionally, brand designers have shied away from working with foodservice brands because there hasn't been the scope to do anything creative.

This isn’t helped by foodservice brand owners that pay little attention to their packs’ branding and design. They tend to want to keep their brands nice and functional. And you just need to look at well known, great quality products from the likes of Pritchitts, Bladen and Meadowland in the dairy category to appreciate the power of function.

This is quite understandable, as it’s the product quality that is of the utmost importance. For many products, if it came in a white bag or bottle with the product name printed on the front in Arial, professional chefs would still choose the tried and tested, no matter what the packaging looked like. Quite right too if the product does the job.

But the influence of brands in foodservice IS changing. Of course, many household brands have been part of the foodservice landscape for a long while. Ambrosia, Knorr, Heinz and McCain are examples of brands that cross the divides of both retail and foodservice. But for those brands that put themselves firmly in foodservice, there’s a sense that a more functional approach to branding is a more acceptable one.

But, as I said, the influence of brands is changing. There are lots more variables now. There’s price - naturally. But taste, performance and availability are also hugely important too. And, of course, there are more good quality products to choose from, which means the tried and trusted ones are not perhaps the automatic choices they once were.

Our recent work with Kerrymaid and its range of dairy ingredients made us question a few of the givens. According to research by the respected Cambridge Direction Group, Kerrymaid was an ‘invisible brand’. It had low impact, little recall and often was mistaken for Kerrygold. Yet the quality and performance of its products were second to none.

Having been tasked to develop the Kerrymaid branding, we questioned just how functional the brand should be on pack and across it marketing communications. It was important that the brand should get noticed, have some appeal yet could present itself as a serious player in foodservice.

Give the brand some emotional appeal, we said. Give it some distinctiveness. Give it some branding! But be clear about each product’s benefits and how it will perform. Cambridge Direction undertook some research and after an anxious wait came back with a green light from professional caterers to develop it and apply to packaging, its trade press advertising and sales collateral.

So what have we learned? Well, I see it as five golden rules to ensure that the right balance is struck between having brand appeal and maintaining that professional credibility in foodservice – whatever the category:

 

The new Kerrymaid range: