A pantry brand that
grew up in seven weeks.
A breakfast cereal company outgrew its corner-shop palette without losing the buyers who'd kept it afloat.
They redrew our entire pantry without making us look like we'd been bought by private equity.— Will Mwangi, Co-founder, Orchard & Oat
Same recipe. Same buyer. Bigger shelf.
Orchard & Oat had spent seven years on the shelves of independent grocers. Sainsbury's offered a national listing. The founders worried — rightly — that scaling the look would scale them out of their original audience.
The packaging needed to read at six metres in a multiple, and at six inches across a Hackney kitchen counter.
We kept the handwriting, changed the grammar.
The illustrated fruit stayed. The custom wordmark — drawn by a co-founder's sister in 2018 — stayed. Everything else was rebuilt to a 6mm grid that survived offset printing and Sainsbury's planogram audit.
We ran the new system past twelve original customers in their kitchens before we showed it to the buyer.
Fourteen SKUs, listed national, in one production cycle.
Shelf-recognition tests showed a 58% lift against the previous packaging on hold-out shoppers. Loyal-buyer retention — measured at the Hackney farmers' market the studio walks past on Saturdays — held at 98%.
The production switch happened over a single bank holiday. Nobody noticed except the trade press.