SPOTLIGHT: Food & Beverage

Muhammad Ali and Arnell Group Punch Up Brand New Snack Line

Nearly everything in the G.O.A.T. package and product design has some relation to boxing and Ali. The reversed image of a young Ali on the package conveys the more serious and committed side of his personality.

Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali has long been concerned with the health of youngsters and their deteriorating eating habits. Ali has recently collaborated with longtime friend and renowned brand inventor Peter Arnell and the Mars Health and Nutrition Group to create a new company to produce tasty and nutritious snack foods that integrate package design with product design.

The G.O.A.T. Food and Beverage Company is launching a range of snack food products aimed at 16- to 24-year-olds. G.O.A.T. is an acronym of the "Greatest of All Time" (that is, Ali), and Ali and Arnell hope that kid-cool packaging will provide an inspirational message of better snacking habits. The products carry names like Rumble, Shuffle, and Jabs and the snacks and packages are in boxing-related shapes.

The G.O.A.T. line provides a wide range of appealing flavors and platforms to offer added value nutrition across a range of snacking occasions. Each low-fat G.O.A.T. product has less than 150 calories and fits into one of six snacking occasions, or "Rounds." The nutritional makeup of each Round is catered to specific eating situations throughout the day, beginning with "Energy for Everything" and ending with "Treat Yourself."

The Greatest cares

Ali said in a statement: "It is time to pass on the values, beliefs, and principles that made me a champ to the next generation of champions. I believe that better nutrition and respect for the mind and body will give everybody today the opportunity to rise above and be the best they can be." The rollout of the product coincided with Ali's 65th birthday on January 17.

Arnell is chair of the U.S. brand invention company the Arnell Group, the firm responsible for the complete DKNY brand identity and the revitalizing of the Samsung brand. Arnell met Ali nine years ago when he was photographing The Greatest. Since meeting Ali, Arnell lost 250 pounds by simply eating smarter. This motivated him to use his experience to motivate young adults to eat healthier one small meal at a time. By sharing each other's experiences, Ali and Arnell began to pursue a common goal.

Desirous for a global food science, nutrition, and technology partner who shared their passion, Ali and Arnell partnered with Mars Incorporated and its innovative Health and Nutrition group. "The idea is to make it easy and desirable for people to increase the nutritional value of the food they eat," says Arnell. "G.O.A.T. is truly unlike any other food product in that it incorporates style with great taste and textures while providing the nutrition needed in a calorically responsible manner."

Arnell looked for the newest and best packaging materials to reflecting the show and flash of Ali. On a trip to Japan Arnell connected with Dai Nippon Printing Inc., which had many new proprietary printing technologies and die-cutting techniques that excited him. The metallic film goes against the category with a fresh new look, and it is overprinted with white to capture the light on campus retail shelves where the products are debuting.

Keeping it real

In Japan, Arnell also looked for inspiration in brand communication. "I wanted to find an iconic language that I could use," says Arnell. All G.O.A.T. food is comprised of signature shapes and forms inspired by the world of boxing, creating a completely new, truly authentic, and ownable food. The packaging had to back up this premium product with premium packaging with the right inspirational cues that would entice young consumers to spend the extra few cents.

The G.O.A.T. logo was created by morphing a boxing glove with a "G," and the Shuffle package is a small boxing glove shape. "We've taken design and made it the critical asset, the intellectual property builder," says Arnell. A gauze pattern suggests the way boxers wrap their hands and wrists before putting on boxing gloves. The design is capped off with a holographic seal, a first for a food product, which conveys both authenticity and youth-awareness.

Arnell explains further: "G.O.A.T. has been developed to engage the young adult population in a manner that truly appeals to them. What really matters to this audience are style, image, a sense of discovery—things that would allow food to become something more that just a snack but part of their identity. Applying this knowledge into the actual food design elements is a key factor that will enable G.O.A.T. to significantly strengthen its connection to young adults. G.O.A.T. is not a diet product—it is a lifestyle brand that is taking on the role of responsible and added value nutrition."

The lifestyle brand also has fun with names and inspirational messages in the voice of Ali. Product names are in categories of Jabs, Shuffle, or Rumble, and the variety names blend flavor and boxing with names like thrill-a dill-a, holy guacamole, fruit fight, slammin' salsa, and apple punched. The packages also carry inspirational messages such as: I run on the road before I dance under the lights; Eat like champions, walk like kings; Rumble, young man, rumble; I don't have to be what you want me to be.

Respect for the imperfect

G.O.A.T. food is based on two design principles that heighten the authenticity and power of the brand: 1) Wabi-Sabi, or Imperfect Beauty; and 2) Mass Customization. Wabi-sabi is the marriage of the Japanese wabi, meaning humble, and sabi, which connotes beauty in the natural progression of time. The phrase invites consumers to set aside the pursuit of perfection and learn to appreciate the simple, unaffected beauty of things as they are. Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection, and it reveres authenticity above all.

The mass customization principle drove G.O.A.T. to go against the norm in factory manufactured food in perfectly identical forms, which can seem impersonal. To give a human touch, G.O.A.T. takes into consideration the wabi-sabi principles of non-uniformity and imperfection, to create a food that looks homemade and therefore authentic. G.O.A.T.'s method for achieving mass customization—minimizing costs while maximizing individual customization—is creating modular components that can be configured into a wide variety of end products.

Economies of scale are gained through the components rather than the products; economies of scope are gained by using the modular components over and over in different products; customization is gained by the myriad of products that can be configured. Typology progresses from simple forms of modularity that allow great variety without really changing the nature of what is being sold to those that allow individual customization and fundamentally change the structure of the product for each consumer.