Global creative agency Anthem Worldwide has designed a new range of 100% natural soups for Unilever’s Knorr. The new range includes four variants (tomato, pumpkin, vegetable and zucchini) and has been launched across France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The ambient soup supermarket aisle’s across mainland Europe are a sea of sameness. In France specifically, the aisle is a consistent wave of duplicates – both in terms of format (brick tetra packs) and design (brand identity on top, product shot in the same style below).

Knorr’s mission was to disrupt this swathe of uniformity with a new range of 100% natural ambient soups using simple ingredients to be packaged in glass bottles. Despite the more premium price point, the new range design needed to be family friendly. Brand recognition needed to remain strong and range navigation easy. Moving into glass bottles would also allow the brand to contribute to Unilever’s sustainability mission and have new conversations with existing and new consumers around ‘healthy you, healthy planet.

Sara Jones, design director at Anthem Benelux, said, “It was important to create a packaging design that mirrored the simplicity of the recipes and one that would support the naturalness of the products. Our design is clean and uncluttered to both support the product message and also achieve stand out on shelf. This was a huge step for Knorr but by giving the brand identity space on pack we were able to maintain strong recognition.”

The choice of illustration style further supports the simple naturalness of the products – it’s wholesome yet vibrant, modest and beautiful. Taking inspiration from the chilled juice category, Anthem Benelux used a shrink sleeve to amplify freshness cues – using the language of another category in both format and printing techniques to innovate and inspire change within a traditional one. The smart integration of the illustrations with the transparent windows brings a new level of authenticity to the products, used on both front and back of pack.

Marie Leroy, Knorr Soups brand manager at Unilever, said, “Working with Anthem helped us tap into new ways of thinking and approaching design – what it means and how it’s perceived by consumers. We wanted to really revolutionize the way Knorr communicates on pack without losing recognition, focused on communicating naturalness and freshness which consumers are really searching for. The new designs hit all our objectives – achieving fantastic stand-out, especially in France.”