Interview about Vegan Packaging Design, winner of the A' Packaging Design Award 2023
Packaging design for the entire range of products for a small company that produces cashew ferments and vegan cheeses. Handmade from plants with 100% vegan natural ingredients. The brand promotes the vegan lifestyle by eliminating actions of exploitation or animal suffering, as well as reducing its impact on the environment. The redesign and branding of its packaging was based on these brand premises, to emphasize the values and ethics of the brand. These premises can also be seen in the material used for the new packaging, recycled material.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsIt was extremely easy, since the client himself has these values in his business, the only thing I had to do to highlight the ecological awareness of the packaging was to base it on the ethics of the brand and the client.The balance between environmental responsibility and visual appeal is due to wanting to highlight the ethics of the company, ethics that the client openly shares.
The logic of the brand's ethical awareness was so overwhelming that there was no other way to approach the design of the packaging and its materials. Thinking about industrial printing for this project would have to deprive the brand of its most precious asset, based primarily on veganism, which is in favor of sustainable ecology and caring for the environment.
The client actually makes these products by hand in an artisanal way, so in this case what I did was also to highlight the properties of the business itself, giving total transparency to the image of the business.The design is constantly based on the values of the client and the business, highlighting their true criteria for the realization of their products and their own lifestyle.
To generate these ideas in images, the main thing was to create our own "vegan food" icon. By law, there is currently no "generic" icon, so what we did was invent it to have our own vegan icon and for it to be understood as such.That was one of the biggest obstacles in the design, how to explain to the consumer this style of creating food and this lifestyle.
To convey the idea of freshness and integrity of the product, what we did was create a "window" in the packaging so that the customer can see the product in situ, so they can see and appreciate the product. In addition, this way we can also show such a special product, especially because of the natural finishes that the customer adds to each variety of fermented product.
In fact, the dimensions of the packaging are determined by the product itself. My client already had the finished product, he just needed a container to market it, so I adapted the packaging measurements to the product, making it a unique package for my client.As for the design, it is entirely based on the vegan lifestyle, and communicating this lifestyle is precisely where the appeal of this packaging comes from.
Redesigning the brand was the main attraction in every sense, based on a design that was completely contrary to and ahead of the competition, which bases its designs on modern aesthetics. Serra Vegana's vegan cheeses and its brand image show the company's ethics in every aspect.
If the design shows that strong connection that was the main interest I had during the design, communicating to the consumer those virtues so different from the rest of the competitors, and also communicating that the brand itself is the first to respect this vegan lifestyle and care for the environment.
Nowadays, the type of packaging is given a lot of importance. I don't think Serra Vegana has a generic influence on other companies, especially because it is a small company, and it is the large corporations that rule the market and their influence.But I would love to show that good sustainable design can be done on a small scale, being totally honest and transparent. Something that often does not happen in large corporations.Sustainable packaging solutions are experiencing an incredible boom and many companies join in simply to follow the current or trend, but Serra Vegana does NOT, they really have this lifestyle, their owners are really vegan and they care for the environment with their small business. They have not followed any trend, they have simply highlighted all those values that they already had in their company and have shown them to the world so that their consumers empathize with them.
Yes, Serra Vegana has not followed the aesthetics or strategy of a dairy product, but above all because it is not a dairy product and we had to avoid this type of packaging and connotations at all costs. In addition, we would be deceiving consumers, and as I have already mentioned before, Serra Vegana is characterized by its honesty.These cheeses are not a dairy product, they are a "fermented cashew" for this very reason we had to move away from the aesthetics of a dairy product, and we would also be committing fraud, since a "vegan cheese" cannot have the word "cheese" on a package by law. Given this obvious fact that we could not ignore under any circumstances, the idea of the design was even clearer, natural colors, from the nature of the product itself, avoiding the blue color characteristic of dairy products so that the consumer would not see anything similar in a dairy product.Regarding the redesign of the brand and packaging, I wanted to give it a traditional touch, of old-fashioned family know-how with a vintage aesthetic, not so much because of the years that the company has been making "vegan cheeses", but because the company is actually made up of 4 people who are family, so we manage to distinguish ourselves from the competition with very, very modern designs.
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