SIAL 2016 - the world's food and drink innovations unwrapped

SIAL is a bit like the soccer World Cup, except it’s held every two years: The whole world is taking part, and the whole world goes to watch.

It’s all about the food & drink business: showcasing innovations, getting noticed and doing deals. For a brand design business like ours, it’s great to get a taste of the cornucopia of branding and packaging styles, design cultures and emerging categories on show there.

You’ll need the entire week to see half of it, but our budget didn’t quite stretch to that. So here’s just a few highlights I took out of the show…. 

Best Country branding

Exhibitors seem to have the choice of setting up shop under the banner of their country areas or within the food or drink category that they operate in. 

Some countries like Turkey covered both bases, with a well-branded (and well-advertised) country area in hall 3, as well as individual stands within categories throughout the show. This allowed the ‘Turkey’ brand to really punch above its weight, though it also made the product brands underneath the umbrella feel less powerful. Since many looked like smaller brands operating in commoditised sectors such as olive oil, tomato products and pasta this may have been deliberate, and it certainly promoted the idea that Turkey is a major player in food production.

Best recipe

You will certainly not go hungry at SIAL, though I felt there was room for more overt sampling or product demonstration than I found. 

This tiny stand (more of a table really) sat within the unmissable if somewhat brashly decorated UK brand territory. But it made up for its size with a carefully curated display of autumnal outdoor life, as befitted its chosen brand story and name: Wild Trail.

Not another trail bar / artisan crisp / cold-press smoothie I hear you say, but this one was genuinely surprising: in terms of appearance (with lots of crunchy and fruity bits sprinkled over the top), taste (more texturally engaging than the usual dense, damp experience) and even formulation. This baby’s got only five ingredients (whereas some competitors have up to 20), and tasted like something I’d want to find in my rucksack - even more than a Snickers.

Least Germanic beer design

This collection of beers from independent German brewer Welde looked firmly at home in the new world of craft everything, with a plethora of typestyles presented in the deceptively organised chaos of a storytelling label. 

Sold in sturdy returnable bottles with simple (but different per brew) black caps and quality matt paper, these would look at home in the hippest of hipster fridges.

At 10.30 on a Wednesday morning a small glass of perfectly chilled Gose went down rather too easily, so I hope the brewery finds the UK Distributor they are currently seeking.

Most eye-catching

Czech-based healthy eating brand lifefood had a really interesting stand with plenty of samples to try. After 3 days of SIAL they had to resort to sticking their remaining packaging examples firmly into their trays, having given away too many earlier in the week!

Despite the almost unbranded and generic naming (‘Chocolate Bar’) of these packs the ‘chocolate eyes’ inside tribal masks certainly create impact. They also sport the most complete claim I saw at the show: ‘Organic Bio Raw Vegan Handmade’, but for me the sense of most of these words is missing from the designs, which ultimately lack craft and hence credibility. Tasted good though!

Even better tasting

Still on the lifefood stand I was drawn to the cleverly named ‘Rawsage’, which is clearly a play on the word ‘Sausage’. Maybe that’s not obvious from this image, but the POS material made the connection very well. 

In contrast to ‘Chocolate Bar’ this one is very well branded, and its key innovation lies in the centre of another long list of claims: Organic Bio Savoury Snack Bar, because of course nearly all healthy snack bars are on the sweet side.

The samples didn’t disappoint, with a pleasantly grainy texture and a spicy kick that placed this more at the chorizo end of the sausage (sorry, ‘rawsage’) spectrum. Guided by the natural leaf illustrations I assumed it was a vegetarian product, but if it ever hits supermarkets I’d suggest adding that claim too.

Most vibrant 

The brightly coloured cans and tetrapaks of BOS iced Rooibos tea are amongst the most distinctive on the soft drink shelf in The Netherlands, but until visiting this stand I hadn’t joined the dots to get to the brand name, or the South African origin. Duhhhh!

It’s the blood-simple design codes that give this brand great cut-through in a crowded market. The flat, bold graphics give a sense of simplicity bordering on raw, and cue naturalness despite the extremely bright colours.

These colours also inject vividness and joy (and unmissable flavour coding), and what better than a surfer’s 2CV to capture the feeling of natural, active, outdoor enjoyment. A breath of fresh air! 

Most sustainable

Riding the twin waves of protein and sustainability, insect-based nutrition was well represented at the show, and this French brand ‘Microdélices’ made it all sound rather tasty.

That nice name couldn’t hide the appearance of the creepy-crawlies, however, at least not in these ‘finger food’ products that helpfully list the number of insects you get in the pack. Cookies and snack bar products looked far more acceptable to the insect-eating novice (that’s 99.5% of us), but for me the fascinating aspect was how should we package the benefits of this new category of food?

Probably not like this. Yes the brown box and limited colour palette ticks the natural and sustainability boxes; the description ‘Apero’ appeals to a specific snacking moment in French culture but means very little to others; and what exactly is ‘Classic’ then - a better known insect recipe?

For me they should really boost the Microdélices brand and claim ‘sustainable protein’ first and foremost. Then give us a clear hierarchy of product type and flavour, with perhaps a witty clue about when to eat them. One of the recipe names here was ‘Garden Party’ - now that’s on the right track.

Best name

This start-up from Estonia had a distinctive stand which seemed to be based on a nightclub in a forest clearing. Strange considering that their new brand of cold-pressed organic juice was called ‘Hey Day’, whose key visual is a perfect sunrise. Or am I missing the point about nightclubs…

I had to congratulate them on a great brand name whose meaning goes well beyond the obvious and literal one of ‘Hello Day’. By coincidence a Swiss brand of granola (for the Polish market) was called just that, but our Estonian friends were presumably aiming higher by offering consumers a Hey Day, defined as: ‘the period of a person's greatest popularity, vigour or prosperity’. 

With product names like Sunbeam, Bonfire and yes, ‘Deep Forest’, I’d be happy to make every day a different type of Hey.

Best challenge to category codes

Finnish company Leader specialises in dietary supplements such as ‘protein foods, health products, vitamins and sports nutrients, as well as Superfoods’. That makes many of their products powders, which presents a special challenge for smoothies where plenty of ‘fresh’ ready to drink competition exists.

But for those in the know the nutritional density of a well-formulated powder mix beats most easy-on-the-eye pasteurised RTDs. Packaging can play up these health benefits by focusing on the long list of beneficial ingredients as a ‘smart formula’. 

But with this design Leader has clearly taken another path: an appetising trail of fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs leads the eye to the prepared drink, whilst the colours seem to have been printed with natural inks from the same ingredients. The box itself is textured and ‘raw’ whilst the typography is decidedly retro-hip, all adding up to a sense of wholesome well-being. Hardly a ‘supplement’ code in sight, except that very out of place branding.

Best pack-as-gadget

Perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the ‘have-it-all’ generation, this Danish innovation gives consumers the chance to indulge themselves in three of their favourite trends - choice, quality and convenience - simultaneously.

Available in numerous selected blends of both coffee and tea, this smart pouch with a separate infusion chamber allows you to brew two cups of your favourite loose tea or ground coffee, then pour it directly from the pack into whatever designer cup or glass you have handy. It’s essentially a giant tea (or coffee) bag that is also its own pot. 

It can also be refilled with consumers’ own loose tea, enabling them to save costs without compromising convenience or taste. I didn’t ask how many times it can be re-used or how easy it is to rinse out, so we can’t add 'sustainable' to the list just yet.

Most Majestic

One of the benefits of a category steeped in natural origin, photogenic locations, unchallenged health benefits and premium pricing is that it’s easy to make packaging look highly attractive. 

Less easy is to stand out from all this beauty, but here’s a charming new brand that’s found a way. 

Most of us have only heard of a handful of olive cultivars, with Kalamata perhaps the best known from Greece; but this brand comes from ‘Koroneiki’ olive trees. 

Koroneiki gets its name from the town of Koroni in Messinia. It is very important to Greek agriculture as 60% of Greek olive oil comes from this variety, which is ranked as one of the world’s best in terms of taste and health benefits.

But brand creation is about telling the best possible story, so forget about 60%, let’s talk about ‘the world’s best’ and the 3000 year history of olive growing in this region.  

That’s the story that The Olive Majesty tells, in elegantly simple, fit for purpose (= keeping the light out), monotone packaging. Delightfully different.

So that was one tenth of SIAL. Next time I'll be unwrapping the myths and mysteries of that latest bright shiny object: Shopper Marketing. See you there.

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Steve Osborne is a Brand Design specialist with over 25 years experience in creating, re-positioning and extending brands for both corporate legends and smart challengers.

A big fan of the neuroscientific insights now being used in marketing, he believes that branding is the strategic design of signals that trigger the stories our brains are wired to respond to. 

Contact Steve for an individual appraisal of any branding or packaging challenges you have on +44 1225 489269 or visit Osborne Pike's website: www.osbornepike.co.uk