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“Our design is Brazil in a bottle,” says John Nunziato, creative director, Little Big Brands. “Vibrant, energetic and even a little sexy.” To get to the final design, Little Big started by spending some time with the Brazil Gourmet client to get a clear understanding of the challenges and opportunities, and its vision for the brand. The Brazil Gourmet team had a real passion and enthusiasm for the products and felt strongly about elevating the packaging.
With the goal of bringing the brand mainstream without losing its Brazilian heritage, Little Big embarked on a deep dive into the category, into Latin-American products broadly, and into the target consumer mindset. Not surprisingly, the firm found that many competitive tropical heritage products rely on “cliché” packaging featuring basketfuls of fruit and a full rainbow’s worth of hues.
But Brazil is a highly sophisticated country with a modern, chic aesthetic, and Little Big felt strongly that the brand’s DNA should reflect this. “More isn’t always more,” Nunziato says. “In the case of a pure, natural product, throwing the kitchen sink at design can really work against you and the brand promise. It opens the door for competitors that are doing it right.”
Little Big kicked off the design exploratory with structural partner Sergio Gedanke of Charge ID, New York City. Gedanke’s structure expertise helped create an overall design that’s appealing and reproducible. Being a native of Brazil, his design sensibilities also helped keep the final product authentic.
Little Big felt that both the graphics and structure could suggest the purity, color, smell, and flavor of the product. The colors are bold and the structure is pure in its form without silly gimmicks. “Overall, the new shape proudly presents the brand as a unique offering,” says Gedanke. “The embossed leaf in an asymmetrical layout transforms a simple bottle structure into something more like a trophy—precious and special. It represents the essence of the fruit itself.”
The embossed leaves above the shoulders serve as a holding device for the Brazil Gourmet logo. They radiate and fan outward into the neck and shoulders to create ownable iconography for the brand.
The Brazil Gourmet logo was distilled to its initials and drawn as an interlocking natural organic symbol. Like the juice itself, the logo now feels exotic. The toucan is near and dear to the Brazil Gourmet brand team—and it held strong equity for the brand. But Little Big knew it could find a more clever way to work the bird into the brand identity. In this case, a connected ligature occurs when the “G” interlocks with the “B” and forms the toucan beak.
The graphics include a series of multiple overlapping elements that communicate energy in an exotic manner. Crisscross patterns suggesting thin tropical vegetation leaves radiate from the top of the bottles and expand as they flow toward the bottom. Little Big feels that this communicates “wildness” in a contemporary and ownable sequence. The primary typography is iconic Brazilian—not stereotypical jungle, tribal, or carnival-ish—and fun accent typography creates a combination that feels both Brazilian and “Western.”
For the liter, 11-oz, and 8-oz plastic bottles, Little Big took the shelf-stable requirement and employed a hot-fill PET bottle that has an expandable panel on the push-up area. This feature allows a clean bottle design on the outside, while pressure from the hot-fill disperses in the bottom of the bottle. The asymmetric 3D decoration near the top is achieved by an oriented shrink-sleeve operation, merging graphics and bottle geometry in an integrated way.
The 10.14-oz glass bottle, meanwhile, features a metal cap with an opening sound cue for freshness check and tamper-evidence. The glass structure allows retort processes or hot-fill operations, and the upper embossed decoration matches the form cues of the other PET bottles.
KEY DESIGN ELEMENTS:
The toucan lives on in the new design only by an elongated beak connecting the “B” and the “G” in the logo.
Little Big Brands felt that premium quality would be conveyed by the precise execution of bottle relief effects, tight shrink sleeve registration, and a stylized “BG” logo.
Thin leaves crisscross around the label to suggest tropical vegetation and authentic sourcing.
Strong, central variety names help shoppers navigate the category at retail.