Atlas Foods

Atlas sells pantry staples in 400 stores, and by 2023 the range had been assembled one product at a time over nine years. Nothing on the shelf agreed with anything else. The packaging system we designed had to work on a crowded shelf, in a delivery app thumbnail, and on a billboard.

Twenty-four products, no photography

The range spans 24 products across six categories: grains and pasta, pulses, oils and vinegars, tinned goods, spices, and baking. Each had to read as family at distance and as individual up close, without a single hero photograph.

That was the press talking. Atlas prints two spot colours on uncoated board in one pass, at a unit cost the buyer would not move. Photography was never available, so type and colour had to carry the whole job of telling one product from another.

Type identifies, colour sorts

We gave each job to one variable and refused to let them overlap. The product name sits in a single condensed grotesque at a fixed cap height on every pack, so a 55 mm spice tin and a 1 kg flour bag carry the same optical weight of name. Category is held by a colour field behind it, six colours mixed as spots and proofed at 20 percent tint because uncoated board drinks ink and drifts warm. Packs come in three widths rather than 24 bespoke layouts, which is what makes the range extendable.

Illustration went first. A set of ingredient drawings, one per product, looked excellent flat on a table and collapsed at shelf distance: at three metres the linework turned grey and the range read as one repeated product. It also priced every future product at a new commission, which would have ended the system inside a year. We dropped it in week three. What replaced it was a rule: no pack is approved until a printed proof survives being pinned three metres away, roughly the width of a supermarket aisle.

What shipped

A typographic packaging system covering all 24 products, category colour logic with spot, CMYK and screen builds for each of the six, and master artwork templates for the three pack formats. The wordmark was redrawn in the same family as the range, so a pack, a van and an invoice all speak once.

We also delivered a 36-page specification, a one-page press sheet the printer keeps taped above the machine, and the three-metre test written down as a procedure the in-house team runs without us.

One year on

The range grew from 24 products to 41 in the twelve months after rollout, and the in-house designer at Atlas produced every one of them. Artwork turnaround for a new product fell from three weeks to four days, because the decisions were already made and written down. A printing constraint, it turns out, makes a better creative director than a moodboard.