Food & Beverage
The battle for shoppers’ attention, affinity, and trust in food and beverage branding is one of the most fiercely competitive and volatile consumer markets today. Shoppers want more than ever from the brands they buy, whether online or in traditional brick-and-mortar stores. With more products flooding the market daily and shoppers’ attention increasingly limited, branding has never been more crucial for food and beverage.
The best food and beverage branding integrates brand and story into every interaction a shopper has with their brand. Selecting the best branding agency for food and beverage is the first step in creating those vital interactions.
As you can see from our site, we specialize in food and beverage branding. Our team has built, launched, refreshed, and relaunched brands in practically any category you can imagine. We have led a global rebrand for a top spirits company, crafted many of Oprah’s Favorite Things, shined on Shark Tank, launched entire new product categories, and changed the way agencies approach craft beer branding.
The years of experience and insight we have amassed over the years are far too lengthy to outline here properly, but here are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a food and beverage branding agency and launching your brand.
Strong Packaging is Crucial for Food and Beverage Brands
Packaging is more than a container.
Your product packaging is one of the most intimate ways a person will experience your brand. They take it in with their eyes, hold it in their hands, bring it into their home, and even put it to their lips. Packaging represents more consumer daily impressions for food and beverage branding than any other communications medium.
Packaging is an opportunity.
Of all the brand touchpoints experienced by consumers, none offer a more potent chance to connect emotionally with your audience than packaging. It is reported that 72% of Americans state that a product’s packaging design influences their purchase decisions. For established food and beverage brands, packaging is as vital as marketing for maintaining recognition and building trust and affinity. For new brands or limited budgets, packaging is your marketing and advertising.
Food and Beverage Branding Psychology & Emotions
Expertly crafted food and beverage packaging is equal parts insight, strategy, and creativity. Each is dependent on the other in crafting packaging that works hard on the shelf and online.
The foundation of strong brand packaging is a deep understanding of consumers and your target audience—their mindsets, desires, preferences, and pain points. Knowing your consumer gives you vital insight into opportunities to surprise, endear, educate, or even challenge the people you want to reach.
Understanding the psychology and emotional landscape of food and beverage branding is a game changer that can profoundly influence consumer perception and behavior. It can give your brand a strategic edge and an unfair advantage in a competitive marketplace.
Emotions play a significant role in shoppers’ decision-making and often overshadow rational considerations. Tapping into emotional triggers like nostalgia, joy, or belonging can summon powerful responses that drive purchase decisions. Understanding your audience’s emotional mindset empowers packaging design that fosters authentic connection and cultivates brand loyalty.
The best food and beverage branding allows your products to entice your audience, pique curiosity, tell a story, inform, surprise, and delight. It is a powerful asset that fights for your brand in stores and online, seizing shoppers’ attention with shelf presence and scroll-stopping impact.
Product Perception & Perceived Value of Your Brand
The benefits of strong package design go beyond emotional connection and purchase intent. Expertly designed packaging layers cues that tell consumers a myriad of things about your brand without them having to read a single word. Deft combinations of color, shape, imagery, materiality, texture, and words can immediately evoke an essence of sophisticated luxury, youthful exuberance, established dependability, or rebellious spirit. Food and beverage packaging design should activate communication strategy.
Effective packaging artfully weaves verbal and visual cues to craft a compelling narrative that captivates consumers. Packaging is a promise of the value of the product inside, building and growing the perceived value of your brand. Combining a bold packaging promise with a quality product experience is lightning in a bottle.
Packaging Creates Brand Recognition, Trust, & Affinity
Smart, creative packaging design is vital to growing your food and beverage brand. Brands grow by creating recognition, fostering affinity, and building trust.
Market research shows the less a seller is recognized along a customer journey, the more likely shoppers are to buy from another business, especially if the offerings are similar. With more consumer impressions than any other medium, packaging plays an immense role in creating brand recognition. A great example is our packaging services for Austin Beerworks. By boldly contrasting the ubiquitous packaging trends in craft beer, we created recognition for a small craft brewery that spanned beyond its home and state across the globe.
Visual hierarchy, message pacing, color billboarding, and impression hierarchy all maximize visibility, brand recognition, and retention. We carefully consider each of these and even employ eye-tracking software to optimize recognition to lightning speed.
Packaging is a vital tool for building trust in your brand. It promises the value of the products inside. Product perception directly drives purchase decisions and builds and grows the perceived value of your brand. Materiality, construction, package architecture, production finishes, and visual and verbal design tell your audience your brand deserves their trust— or does not. Getting packaging production right is such a crucial factor for inspiring trust that we have a number of team members whose jobs focus solely on that piece of the packaging puzzle.
Shoppers can recognize multiple brands on the shelf and trust that more than one delivers the same value. Retail shoppers care about more than costs. When multiple food and beverage brands offer similar items at similar prices and levels of trust, buyers choose the option they like more. Packaging is a key instrument in building that affinity.
Packaging can help spark affinity for your brand in many ways. Aesthetics, tone, personality, and point of view are just a few factors that can impact people in different ways.
A great example of this is the packaging and unboxing experiences we built for Chameleon Coffee, Krakatoa Hot Chips, and Lone River Ranch Water. Each system shows a carefully crafted and artfully paced experience, with meaningful moments designed into every step, from the minute they are purchased and opened. Great food and beverage packaging doesn’t just tell a story about the product. It tells a story about the benefits it brings the buyer, how it can make them feel, and what it says about them to the world.
Smart Brand Architecture is Crucial
When launching a new food and beverage brand, choosing the right brand architecture gives your product portfolio room for growth while creating impact for a singular brand here and now.
This strategic approach to organizing and presenting a line of products or sub-brands should be tackled in the first phase of brand creation. Brand architecture informs naming, packaging, and even the approach to category and competitive analysis.
Branded House
Under the branded house strategy, all products are positioned under a single, cohesive brand. Think Amazon (Prime, Music, Web Services, etc.), Coke, or Apple. The branded house model leverages a strength-in-numbers approach to form a comprehensive, multifaceted brand image in consumers’ minds. Visual identity, message, packaging, and story all ladder up to a singular brand presence. Unity reinforces recognition, builds trust, and helps to grow equity.
House of Brands
An alternative to the branded house architecture in consumer goods is the House of Brands model. This approach is often used by companies with a diverse product range, where each sub-brand has its own unique identity. This pluralistic strategy allows companies to serve substantially different markets, audiences, or consumer needs.
One challenge to a house of brands is that the model can be resource-intensive, with each brand working to market its products independently. Five brands with five marketing budgets are a lot more to juggle than one unified brand.
The Endorser & Hybrid Models
As a hybrid approach, the endorser model allows you to have your cake and eat it, too. If your parent brand has established trust, recognition, and a great reputation, you can introduce a new product with the endorsement of that brand. DoubleTree by Hilton and Kellog’s Rice Krispies are examples of the endorser model.
An endorser strategy allows companies to balance individual brands’ autonomy and the parent brand’s overarching influence. This approach works well when the offerings within the portfolio are related but still have distinct characteristics or speak to different consumer groups.
A newly emerging “hybrid” approach combines elements from all three strategies and addresses specific variances within a company’s brand portfolio, often related to varying consumer segmentation.
When launching a new food and beverage product, it is critical to define your vision before choosing a brand architecture. If your company has the potential to grow into different markets, categories, or consumer tiers, it’s essential to consider that at the start. The more you can plan for growth, the more likely you will achieve it.
Artfully Harnessing Trends & Research
Understanding the right ways to harness trends and research in food and beverage branding is an advantage for brands today. Keen insight into trends big and small give a brand context for how they fit into the marketplace and could stand out from the pack. A firm grasp of consumer preferences allows food and beverage brands to craft messaging and packaging that appeal to their target audiences.
Neither should be taken at face value, however. Done poorly, both trendscaping and consumer research can put your brand behind the curve of where the industry is headed and dilute the equity you hold or are working to build with shoppers. In both cases, interpretation of the data you mine from the world is the key to successfully ___ing the power of each methodology.
Trendscaping
Positioning your food and beverage brand around macro trends with a subtle lean into current micro-trends can be a powerful combination that builds both relevance and longevity.
Macro Trends
Macro trends are large-scale scale, pervasive trends that have an impact on culture and society, as well as the economy. These trends are long-lasting and slower to change than momentary blips in preference or interest. Healthy snacking and protein packing are both examples of macro trends in food and beverage. In packaging, sustainability and curated unboxing experiences are both macro trends.
The advantage of macro-trends is that they build over time and tend to stick around. Identifying a macro trend early in its cycle is like catching lightning in a bottle— it positions you as an innovator and the leader of a movement. We saw this first hand early in our life as an agency when we turned craft beer design on its head by contrasting the busy, cluttered packaging on the shelves with simple and bold branding that was easy to identify and understand.
Micro Trends
Smaller trends that come and go quickly are sometimes useful, but positioning your brand solely based on them can be a mistake. One of the more significant challenges with micro-trends is staying ahead of the curve with the time required to roll out new packaging. Design fads and consumer preferences are frequently changing— so using micro-trends in digital marketing is much safer than in food and beverage packaging.
Research
Consumer research for food and beverage branding is a valuable tool that can inform design, measure efficacy, and align team members and stakeholders for the brand. However, it’s not a silver bullet. It’s vital to know the potential pitfalls of research and the right ways to interpret and utilize the information you receive from consumers.
If you take away one thing from this content, it is a mistake to take data in design research at face value. Responses inevitably reflect myriad biases and often reflect how a subject wants to be seen or what they think they should answer rather than truly representing the decisions they make when shopping.
Setting clear objectives and crafting questions around design research is critical to harvesting genuinely valuable insights. You should never ask open-ended questions about design or what a subject “likes.” Focus questions on targeted areas like functionality and emotional response for more meaningful feedback.
Another challenge to research is that subjects tend to play it safe and lean toward familiarity. Disruptive or innovative packaging seldom fares well. Most subjects will choose the option closest to another existing product, even if instructed otherwise.
We often use a combination of brand equity research, concept testing and validation testing in developing food and beverage branding and packaging. The first is a valuable tool for uncovering existing equity to leverage in a brand refresh. Concept testing is a useful tool in the early phases of the design process. It helps align an indecisive team and put data behind a decision. Though not always necessary, validation testing can stress test finalized packaging design before going into production.
Innovation
We study food and beverage packaging from yesterday and today, but what about tomorrow? Innovation is at the heart of effective packaging design. In an era where consumers are constantly seeking new experiences, brands must stay ahead of the curve with innovative packaging solutions. This can include anything from smart packaging with QR codes that provide additional product information to eco-friendly materials that speak to environmentally conscious consumers.
If you’d like to see an even more whimsical and dramatic example of innovation’s impact, check out the world’s first 99-pack of beer.
Food & Beverage Branding FAQ
What makes food and beverage branding different from other industries?
Food and beverage branding engages all five senses in a way that other industries simply cannot. Beyond visual identity, successful F&B brands must consider the entire customer experience, encompassing taste, aroma, tactile packaging, web design, and even the sounds associated with their products (think of the iconic crack of a soda can opening). This multi-sensory approach requires specialized expertise to ensure that all touchpoints work harmoniously, creating a cohesive brand experience that resonates on both emotional and physical levels simultaneously.
How important is packaging design in food and beverage branding?
Packaging design is arguably the most critical touchpoint in F&B branding—it’s your product’s “moment of truth” on crowded retail shelves where consumers make split-second purchasing decisions. Effective packaging must balance eye-catching aesthetics with functional considerations, communicate key benefits instantly, meet regulatory requirements, protect product integrity, and create a distinctive silhouette that’s recognizable even from a distance. In today’s market, sustainable packaging options have also become a significant factor in consumer decision-making, with brands needing to balance environmental responsibility with practical preservation needs.
How do we ensure our food or beverage brand will resonate with our target audience?
Audience resonance in food and beverage branding requires deep consumer insights beyond basic demographics. Understanding your audience’s lifestyle patterns, taste preferences, consumption occasions, and emotional relationships with food is essential. This often involves a marketing agency, commissioning ethnographic research, taste testing, shopping behavior analysis, and social listening to identify unmet needs or pain points. A specialized food and beverage marketing agency conducts this research to develop brand positioning that authentically connects with your audience’s values and creates meaningful differentiation from competitors in ways that specifically matter to your target consumers.
How long does the food and beverage branding process typically take?
A comprehensive F&B branding project typically ranges from 3-6 months, depending on complexity, research requirements, and the scope of deliverables. The timeline includes: discovery and research (3-4 weeks), strategy development (3-4 weeks), visual identity creation (4-6 weeks), identity / packaging design (4-6 weeks), and implementation guidelines (2-3 weeks). Additional considerations include production timelines for packaging design prototypes, photography of final products, and regulatory approval processes which vary by product category and market. Rushing this process often leads to missed opportunities for differentiation or costly revisions later, so building adequate time for exploration and refinement is crucial.
What’s the most common mistake companies make when branding food and beverage products?
The most common mistake is prioritizing design trends over authentic brand differentiation. Many brands create visually attractive packaging that follows category conventions but fails to establish meaningful distinction. Successful F&B branding requires identifying a genuine point of difference—whether through innovative ingredients, unique production methods, compelling founder stories, or distinctive taste experiences—and expressing this difference consistently across all touchpoints. Another frequent error by food and beverage brands is neglecting to consider practical shelf impact and visibility in actual retail environments, where your brand must compete with dozens of alternatives under varied lighting conditions and shelf placements.
