The Grab-and-Go market is highly competitive across the Middle East where the culture of eating on-the-go is highly established. Global coffee brands Starbucks, Café Nero and Caribou are all highly visible throughout the region, commingled with eclectic homegrown brands found in more off-the-beaten-track locations.

Enter Costa Coffee: a London-born and blended brand, vying for their share of the market in a highly competitive, coffee-loving region. Their savoury food packaging was outdated with uninspiring Kraft board the wrapping of choice for the majority of products. Add to that a confusing naming hierarchy, cluttered food cabinets obscuring many items from view, and a distinct lack of packaging, name and identifying colour definition, and consumers were left scratching their heads. Our challenge was super clear: to create a top-down, unified system that was not only easy to produce, but could be replicated seamlessly across multiple countries.

Via extensive and intensive local research, we developed a completely new look and feel for all of Costa Coffee’s Grab-and-Go food packaging, that was both creative and compliant with consumer requirements. The new packaging design was modern and fresh whilst utilising the Costa 'burgundy' colour.  Specific colours were designated to foods containing seafood, meat, or veg, creating a classification system that was visually identifiable. Bespoke iconography was developed to denote keto and vegan options, calory content and serving suggestions, with simplicity being the key to ensure the product remained the hero. With clear packaging guidelines developed for each of the food categories, a 'Costa system' was created, making regional rollout consistent and easy.  

A key milestone in the project was getting client buy-in on our strategy to make the product the hero, and to keep packaging as unobtrusive as possible. The "less is more" theory really rang true for this brand and their products.