The Dieline Awards Editor’s Choice goes to a design handpicked by The Dieline’s Founder, Andrew Gibbs, for its outstanding mission and execution. This year’s Editor’s Choice award goes to Chobani for their wonderful redesign that launched late last year.
Chobani packaging suffered from three challenges:
Imitated— Imitation of this category leader diluted consumer belief that its price premium was justified.
Invisible— With over 100+ competing SKUs on shelf, Chobani was at a disadvantage. Its all-capital, thin-lettered wordmark was difficult to recognize at a short distance.
Inaccurate— Chobani products promise naturalness and simplicity. The brand promises craftsmanship and innocence. Yet, the packaging was sterile, shiny, and industrial looking.
We approached the work as if we were makers of small-batch yogurt who used simple tools and lacked expertise in packaging design. The watercolor fruit imagery is intentionally imperfect. The color palette is pulled from flora references in Upstate, NY, where the yogurt is made. The typography is a transitional text and simple in it layout. The stamps are placed inconsistently to suggest that they were stamped by hand.
Chobani intended to enter the non-Greek category with a new product called “Smooth Yogurt.” The non-Greek buyer lives in the middle of the country, skews older (45+), is highly price-sensitive, chooses yogurt based on flavor, and believes it is their responsibility to uphold “traditional values” in America. Smooth Yogurt’s packaging design needed to accessible, flavor forward, and traditional, while upholding core Chobani brand values of natural and crafted.
Our solution is inspired by images of classic Americana-specifically the kitchens and food packaging of the 1960s. Its illustrations are an homage to the floral aprons and wallpapers of this audiences’ childhood homes, but with a modern color palette. The illustration appeals to their need for flavor and reinforces the brand ideas of craftsmanship and natural.
Chobani® Flip® is a Greek Yogurt product offering crunchy toppings. The creativity of its ingredient pairings and fun product personality have always been its point of differentiation. Chobani recognized a massive growth opportunity in repositioning Flip® from a breakfast food to an all-day snack competing with candy bars and granola bars. This required a change to the packaging label.
Our solution aims to visually communicate-but in our own unique way-as the snack bar category does: graphically and colorfully. Our illustration style is customized to each SKU and emphasizes the key topping that defines each one. The style’s looseness and vibrancy retain the product’s playful personality.
Chobani needed packaging for a new product aimed at functional eaters who want subtle flavoring and less sugar in their yogurt. Because rationality defines this consumer’s relationship with food, we designed to those values. We also made sure the packaging aligned with the brand value of craftsmanship.
We worked from the idea of small-batch packaging and made information the hero. Classic clay yogurt pots inspired the cup shape. Nutrition information is pulled to the font of the label to improve shelf navigation. Each flavor is identified with a soft color to suggest “subtle flavor.” The color is applied using a dither technique to signal the “infusion” of fruit rather than inclusion of chunks. Copy on the top label romances the varietal fruit used to flavor each SKU.
Designed By: Chobani Creative
Illustrators: Gabrielle Lamontagne, Fanny Gentle, Pat Iadanza
Location: New York, NY
