3 Top Tips for Creative Food Packaging Design

You’ve got an awesome product you totally believe in, next step is getting it into the hands of your customers.

Creative food packaging can help your product stand out from the crowd and get it flying off the shelves.

Whatever style you choose to go for, make sure you enter the market with a bang, not a whimper.

Here are our 3 top tips for creative food packaging design.

1. Go Big on Color

Something you never want to be is bland and beige, fading into the background.

Whether you choose a bring packaging, or a strong signature shade against a bright white background, make sure that it will pop out at customers as they scan the shelves.

This doesn’t mean a busy design is better. Your use of color should be focused on guiding the eye of the shopper to where you want them to look. This could be a stylized graphic of the food or text highlighting a unique selling point.

2. Tap into ‘Biomotive’ Triggers

We might assume food companies choose their fonts and graphics based on the food product, nostalgia or the history of the company. Actually, there’s a lot more science behind the way successful food products are marketed.

Focus first, not on the product, but on the emotions that you want to trigger in the customer. Most consumers do not make food choices after standing and reading miles of blurb.

You need to catch their eye, stir an emotion and make them want to buy.

Chili dark chocolate is an example of the use of cusps to trigger certain emotions in potential consumers. Cusps are pointed shapes like horns and arrows that give products an edgy, daring feel.

With an unusual product like chili dark chocolate, that pushes the boundaries of our normal expectations of confectionery, you want to trigger a frisson of excitement in the customer, creating a powerful pull.

3. Be Original

It can be tempting (maybe even subconsciously) to copy a market leader, reasoning that if it’s worked for them, it’ll work for us.

Customers find copycat marketing extremely confusing, and confusion is not your friend when it comes to creating a coherent narrative to sell your product.

By all means, analyze what has worked for the competition. Learn lessons. But don’t be afraid to do something totally different. Remember, this will help you to stand out.

If all the products on the shelf look roughly the same, they’ll merge into one before the customer’s eyes.

A lot of recent innovations in food marketing have centered around a central word in large text to grab the attention of the customer. This approach should be considered as the message is crystal clear and unambiguous.