Chelan Beauty worked with design agency OlssønBarbieri to create a packaging system showcasing the brand’s sustainable elements while highlighting a playful identity. In addition, the illustrations by Giacomo Bagnara provide an optimistic punch with effortlessness, further elevating the beauty of the fruit while emphasizing the spirit of Chelan Beauty as a farm of the future.
The Solution / Project Description
The farm adventure of Bill and Angell Clark began in 1991 when they decided to start leasing orchards in Washington State to make a living. Bill was an early proponent of organic farming and believed it was a better way to operate for the soil and those who worked it. Their farm, located by Lake Chelan in Washington, is known for focusing on quality over quantity, striving to grow the best organic produce available while keeping their farm under 200 acres. With a mission to raise the bar on the American food system and make healthy food more fun and educational, Chelan Beauty asked us to develop a new identity, packaging, and subscription system for their products.
Not all farming is good farming. Industrial agriculture is the intensive farming of live animals and crops for the mass production of food and food byproducts. For much of human history, agriculture relied on countless small farms to produce a wide variety of foods. But now, small independent and family-run farms use only 8% of all agricultural land. In just under a century, and especially since the 1960s, agriculture has become dominated by large-scale multinational corporations. Driven by profit, these food giants rely on practices that, by design, exploit and abuse animals, destroy natural habitats, and generate pollution and climate-changing emissions.
Today, it’s no longer just about eating sustainably, which implies a state of preserving the status quo of the food industry. A new generation wants food from companies that are actively healing the planet through regenerative agriculture, more rigorous animal welfare policies, and equitable treatment of the people who grow and process food. Our goal for Chelan Beauty was to encourage healthier eating habits and more sustainable choices by articulating a new idea of deliciousness that merge nourishment with pleasure. The identity and packaging system is a contemporary take on the language of fruit, and an inclusive image of the ‘new farm’ — a place that aims to inspire change through healthy habits — by balancing seriousness and fun, science and pleasure.
We created a tailored experience for the subscription service, to encourage people to order deliveries at home. Subscription service offers people a direct link from farm to consumer, ensuring fresh produce and a personal relationship to the grower, knowing that the money goes directly to the farm instead of supporting a complex logistic system and storage, making fruit, like apples, often be several months old before they are sold in retail.
The subscription boxes are printed in one color for economy with the possibility to personalise each one with colorful stickers, messages, and fruit drawings. We also developed a retail packaging system for their freeze-dried fruits, a technique preserving most of the nutritional values of the fresh fruit, allowing Chelan Beauty to extend their business beyond the harvest seasons.
The identity is set in Neuzeit, a geometrical and functional sans serif paired with Cigars, a serif font adding a touch of elegance and sophistication. The illustrations by Giacomo Bagnara, provide a positive energy, with a geometrical and timeless quality, elevating the beauty of the fruit, while underscoring the independent and optimistic spirit of Chelan Beauty as a farm of the future.
