Olive Oil and Chickpea Pasta Got Cool. You Can Blame This Agency

To be honest, they’re one and the same—but for a long time, creative agencies were sleeping on grocery products. That’s why my team is approaching food and beverage with the same label identity principles that are usually reserved for other categories.

It’s about a concept: finding what’s really interesting about the brand in question and displaying that through copy and design. Maybe they were the first to marketplace with some sort of product ten years ago, and now there are a million brands that are selling the very same thing, so how can they distinguish themselves?

All the same, we learn everything we can about what’s happening around a particular type of product in this moment. We’ll survey hundreds of people to learn how they’re shopping and what their favorite brands are. When we got under way working with Graza, they had this amazing product, and they knew they wanted it to come in a squeeze bottle, but they didn’t know much else.

And most as well didn’t have a favorite olive oil—they’d reassess every time they went to the store based on the cooking project at hand or the price point. We wanted to make Graza into a product that made people very interested in the type of oil that they were buying.

And, as it turns out, people were just hungry to have a name that they could feel excited about that they could as well grab at the local Key Food. We worked with Graza to create every element of the name, from the photography and the label illustration to the web design: We wanted bright colors to differentiate the plastic squeeze bottle, and basic packaging that listed the weighty facts (single-origin, extra-virgin, organic) without overwhelming shoppers with tons of information they neither want nor need.

And we in addition wanted to demystify the difference between cookery oil and “finishing oil,” which is where the “drizzle” and “sizzle” monikers on the bottle comes from. We’re seeing the stuff on shelves everywhere in the country—not just New York and California.

They’re such strong proof of the reach of a great product, with great branding, that solves a very real need or gap in the trade. We’ve definitely had people reach out in the past to work with us, and once they sent us the product samples, we declined to work with them—and we take a lot of pride in that.

So we need to be really proud of whatever it is that we’re creating brands for. It’s casual, and it’s human, and that makes the food and beverage world feel so much more accessible.

At the end of the day, people just want to feel spoken to like . . . real people. You’re stating, “Hey, I need canned tomatoes for pasta sauce.” That stated, when you’re in the tomato aisle. You look at something and you’re like, “Whoa, I actually want to buy this for reasons beyond the fact that it will be exactly what I’m expecting it to be: tomatoes in a can,” that’s exciting.

I love preparation, so anytime I feel like I’m interacting with a brand in a way that makes my cookery experience more fun, or I’m joyful, I want to continue to seek out that product.