SPOTLIGHT: Food & Beverage

The Silver Palate Gourmet Products
Regain High-End Stature and Presence

William Fox Munroe brought the Silver Palate brand back to its gourmet roots with a consistent and authentic presentation.

The Silver Palate brand started from modest beginnings as a small gourmet food shop in Manhattan's Upper West Side in 1977. Only a few years later, founders Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins were best-selling authors of The Silver Palate Cookbook and distributors of popular dressings and sauces under the brand name of The Silver Palate.

The Silver Palate dressings and sauces were possibly the first lines of gourmet specialty food products to gain significant traction in the market, certainly bolstered by the popularity of the cookbook. After selling this well-respected retail brand to Peter Harris in 1988, they continued to write cookbooks and explore other projects.

Over the years, the line grew into a brand that conveyed high-quality, even though there was no unified approach covering the dressings and sauces, let alone all 200 diverse Silver Palate products. The retail shelf presence of the dressings and sauces was strong and often created an identifiable block, but not always with the desired effect. Nevertheless, the retailers never really complained about the packaging.

Harris had consulted with design agencies from time to time for brand restructuring ideas, but no redesign ideas had made a serious impression and no design firm came with the right personality fit. At a NASFT Fancy Food Show a couple of years ago, however, representatives from William Fox Munroe (WFM), a package and brand design firm in Shillington, PA, approached Silver Palate with a receptive attitude.

Building relationships

Harris had a good feeling about WFM right away. The WFM firm, led by art director Amy Parker and senior designer Stephanie Bennett, presented Harris with a strong design approach focused on the strongest Silver Palate logo and featuring labels with a two-tone Victorian background pattern, consistent product name treatments, and a box for descriptive copy.

"To me, it makes the whole package so much more classy and sophisticated," says Harris. "It's a clean look that communicates." A limited promotional and production budget meant limited ad support, and a proprietary bottle shape would throw a wrench into production, so the label had to do all the work rebuilding the brand. "The goal is to be different and unique," says Harris. "It's hard to do that with mainstream packaging."

The descriptive "romance" copy on the front label was a package design element that Harris felt strongly about. WFM and Harris agreed that well-written and informative copy on the front would convey authenticity. There already was a good deal of copy on the Silver Palate labels, just in different places, of different lengths, and with different emphases. WFM remade each blurb on the front to be informative, engaging, and consistently concise.

WFM approached the content of the illustrations a little differently than one might expect. They decided that the content of the illustrations could hint at ingredient flavor without necessarily including an image of every single ingredient in the bottle. They felt it was important to include food elements based on their colors and how those colors worked together on a particular label.

Practical and green

"We're a lot more practical than a lot of design firms," says Tom Newmaster, partner at William Fox Munroe. WFM also ended up using mostly purchased stock imagery of vegetables, fruits, and spices for the labels. In Photoshop, the WFM designers would tweak the colors, adjust the contrasts, add watercolor effects and combine the elements in ways that made as much sense graphically as anything else.

The background of the core line of 50 labels is an ornate two-tone Victorian-style pattern. For the organic line, they modified the Victorian pattern to be more leafy and, of course, used green shades. "It takes organic to another level," says Harris. "It keeps it in the same family but differentiates it."

The redesigned Silver Palate packages are being introduced at a perfect time, though not part of any master plan by Harris. Rosso and Lukins plan to release a 25th Anniversary Edition of The Silver Palate Cookbook, which they are supporting with a book tour. Also helping sales is a recent Consumer Reports article that ranked the Silver Palate Balsamic Country Salad Splash #1 for its taste.