Explorations, Industrial Design, Retail Design, Web

Packaging, contests, games, recipes, online portals, prizes and product information make CPGs more fun than fresh. Able to transform assembled ingredients into brand experiences, they’re often used as tricky tools to distract consumers from the fact that what’s inside the box is anything but fresh obsessed and rarely the healthiest choice possible. But with more consumers becoming increasingly concerned about the contents of their kitchens, what’s inside their purchases and where they came from, fruits and vegetables could take the fun out of fake food forever. All they need is a little brand innovation.

Idea Couture’s first book, No One Works Here, is diet-free. For over-bloated brands and businesses, that means there’s no quick and easy way to shed those unwanted pounds. Instead, for organizations addicted to gobbling up profits at the expense of customers, it offers a step-by-step guide to new the sustainability. Big shifts come in small, incremental ideas. One of ours explores how Waitrose, Britain’s leading supermarket, could nurture nature with a little design, experience and communication idea.

Waitrose Fresh Stamps is a line of organic fruits and vegetables that utilize laser-etching technology to enhance the experience of purchasing, preparing and eating produce. An innovation in customer communication and co-creation, it transforms fresh food into a tasty media hub by making every surface, skin and peel a canvas for artistic expression, consumer information and brand exploration.

Customers can pick and choose from four ways to make their fruits and vegetables even more fresh: recipes that present new and exciting ways to use the tastiest ingredients at home; origins maps promote local farmers and greater transparency regarding imported produce; nutritional facts detail the vitamins and describe the health benefits; and cutting templates make slicing and dicing more fun. In addition to differentiating one of the highest traffic areas in the grocery store, a prominently placed unique URL takes customers directly to a web page specific to the fruit or vegetable where videos, photos and interactive features link customers to Waitrose, its sister companies and its burgeoning media properties.

Case Study: Food Scavenger
If you could write anything on your apple what would it be? Well for starters maybe a date, so you know how much longer your Golden Delicious will last in your fridge. But think of the opportunities for marketing. Create a product scavenger hunt in the produce section. You could create recipes that would be handed out to customers when then enter, but products are simply numbered. How to you create the perfect fruit salad? 1+3+5+8=YUM!  This could lead to further collaborations with other producers, creating recipes that are brand specific. You could develop an online competition for say, the best apple crisp and the winning recipe would be printed right on the apples. As you can see, the possibilities are endless. Mega Bonus? You will never get up to the checkout and be faced with a look of confusion because the fruits to picked just happen to be missing the all important product code.