The market for foodstuff is one of the largest in the world — millions of companies are clamouring to market their products to billions of consumers out there. Suffice it to say, competition is quite steep in such an environment, and many companies have trouble making their products stand out and sell.
How can you make your products stand out? How can you make them fly off the shelves? How can you make your cakes sell like hotcakes? In this article, we’ll go over ways you can make the packaging for your food products interesting and unique!
Every decision about the product packaging design will start from this question: what colours are you going to use in the packaging? The choice of the colours and how you decide to mix them will ultimately determine how your products look on store shelves.
Although there aren’t ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ colours, there are certain colours that go well together, and there are certain colours that look horrid together. Ultimately, it is possible to make your products stand out whether you’re using yellow, orange, grey, or black, but it would certainly be more difficult given certain colour combinations. By starting with the ‘right’ colours, you’ll make the rest of the process far easier.
Quite evidently, the size and shape of the packaging matter a lot, especially when you want it to stand out — smaller packages are harder to see on store shelves, and they attract less attention. On the other hand, if the packaging is too large, it will increase the costs of both storage and the packaging itself, making the product less economical.
Here, you need to strike the right balance and find the sweet spot — a spot where the packaging is large enough for the product to be easily recognizable on store shelves while it is small enough for storage and package manufacturing costs to stay manageable. It is not always easy to strike the right balance, but you can optimize the process over time.
#3 Branding and Embellishment
Although consumers usually decide which product to buy based on price, branding still matters a lot — there are a lot of influential companies on the food market that sell billions of foodstuffs each year based on brand recognition alone.
As a company, you want to slowly build your brand while adding enough embellishments to the packaging to make it appear unique and interesting, not dull and uninspired. This means that while you need to make sure your brand is visible and takes centre stage, you need to also make sure the packaging isn’t inundated with marketing making it feel cheap and vapid.
#4 Targeting Specific Demographics
What kind of food products are you offering? Does it appeal to a specific demographic more than others? It is very common for companies to vary the packaging of their products depending on the demographics they target.
As a simple example, if you are a company offering sweets traditionally eaten by kids, you’d want to make the packaging colorful and appealing for kids, as they are your primary consumers. On the other hand, if your product is a protein bar targeted to gym goers, you’d go with a more ‘cool’, darker black or gray packaging.
#5 Make the Packaging Complement the Food
Choosing the final packaging design is a long and important process, but you have to always keep something in mind: the packaging is ultimately there for the food. There are some companies that go overboard with the packaging, so much so that it becomes completely divorced from the product.
This is a major mistake: in reality, the packaging should only be secondary — its primary purpose is to protect the food, keep it tasty, and help with storage. While it is important for the packaging to stand out, you shouldn’t forget its primary purpose, because that’s a formula for a disaster. And if you have trouble getting it right, you should contact a competent food boxes manufacturer.
