Food & takeaway packaging design

It is advertising that the customer carries

A menu is read inside your venue by someone who already found you. A takeaway box travels — to a desk, a living room, a table of colleagues who have not eaten with you yet. It is seen by more people than the menu, in more places, and it is the one piece of your brand that goes out into the world without a member of staff attached to it.

Which makes the usual approach to it strange. Most venues choose packaging on price alone and print the logo somewhere on it, then spend considerably more on a menu that only existing customers see.

Designing for the substrate, not the screen

Packaging is where brand colours most often fall apart. Kraft board shifts everything warm and mutes saturation. Greaseproof surfaces accept ink differently. A pink that sings on a laminated menu card can come back muddy on a carton, and nobody notices until the first pallet arrives.

So when we design packaging and menus together, colour is chosen to survive both. Sometimes that means a slightly different build of the same brand colour on each — which looks like a compromise and is actually the only way to get consistency a customer will perceive.

Where the mark goes

On a burger box, the logo on the lid is invisible the moment the lid opens and the food appears. On a fry carton it competes with the fries themselves. The useful placements are the ones still visible while the food is being eaten — the front face, the side panel, the sleeve — because that is when the pack is in front of a person for ten minutes rather than two seconds.