Bla Bla Foods
Creating a brand for little humans and their families
The client partner was a Swedish serial entrepreneur and busy mom frustrated at the options for healthy and nutritious baby and toddler food. While in Sweden, mom and baby fell in love with the simple, clean, and plant-based food. She started Bla Bla Foods to make “plant-based products for little humans and their families that are good for you and the environment.” Their two main products are — Välling and Gröt! So, what are these? Well, they are a super nutritious oat milk and an oat porridge.
The creative brief was, well, brief. Modern, minimal, natural, and playful. Oh, and with a sophisticated Nordic vibe. The requirements were extensive — new branding, color palette, iconography, and product packaging. All of this to be created for roll-out at the upcoming Natural Products Expo West show in only four weeks.
Research was focused and quick, reviewing other baby and oat products and Scandinavian design to get a sense of that unique Nordic look. This was documented in a simple brand mood book.
Initial designs explored how to graphically depict the key ingredient—oats, while channeling my inner Norseman.
The final mark is a culmination starting from initial explorations of two stylized oat grains arranged to form a heart. This was combined with the suggestion to explore animal depictions, since the original logo was based upon a raccoon face. As I worked through this idea, an intriguing combination of oat grains, a heart, and face emerged to create a distinctive, memorable logo — the ultimate goals of this creative process.
The logo settled, I turned my creative attention to creating iconography matching the look and feel of the logo. These icons depicted product ingredients, playful splashes, bottles, containers, a pacifier, hearts, moons, stars, and even, muscles. These would all be used to help tell various aspects of the product story on packaging and other marketing materials.
Bringing it all together on the package
With a strong logo, a smorgasbord of icons, and a Nordic color palette, along with clear guidance to evoke a modern, minimal, sophisticated Scandinavian vibe the packaging quickly came together. The intent was to have clear color differentiation between the two products and make it clear one was more suitable for infants while the other was for toddlers and older. It also became apparent that product names were not going to work. So, oat milk was paired with Välling and Smart Oats replaced Gröt. Icons highlight the key product ingredients. A clean, pure white square with the brand mark, tagline, product name and product descriptions rests above a playful pattern of icons.
