Summary: Food Branding - Codes that Work and Codes that are Outdated
The food sector is one of the most visually saturated. The codes that dominated five years ago have become background noise on the shelf. Kraft paper, handwritten fonts, promises of naturalness: everyone uses them, no one stands out. A new generation of food brands is emerging with different codes, more current, more social, more addictive. This article analyzes what still works, what is saturated, and what creates true differentiation in food branding today. Wiiv is a strategic branding and packaging agency based in Paris, operating in Bordeaux, Lyon, and Milan, specializing in e-commerce food, cosmetic, fashion, and lifestyle brands.
Food Branding: Major Sectors and Their Challenges
The food sector is far from homogeneous. Each sub-sector has its own codes, target expectations, and branding and packaging requirements. Here are the main ones:
Delicatessen and artisan products. This is the sector where branding most directly justifies the price. The buyer pays two to three times the price of a supermarket product. The packaging must validate it even before purchase. Without a strong identity, the premium price becomes unjustifiable in the eyes of the buyer. Products with fake artisanal qualities have broken something in the eyes of the buyer; it is necessary to work twice as hard as before to convince them to pay the price again.
"Functional" and health drinks. A rapidly booming market, saturated in a few years. The visual codes all look alike: bright colors, big health claims, technical typographies. Differentiation through branding has become the only way to stand out from the noise. In the drink industry, it is more than necessary to find your voice, your unique branding.
Healthy snacking. A sector that must convince in two seconds that its product is good AND healthy. Information hierarchy is critical: too many brands try to highlight all the health benefits, with the result that you see nothing and move on to the next product.
Condiments, sauces, and spices. Products often relegated to the back of the cupboard, bought out of habit. Branding is what transforms a functional product into a desirable one, an item you place on the table rather than hide in a drawer. A strong advantage for this sector is that general branding leaves much to be desired; the field is open!
Premium confectionery and chocolate. The sector of gifts and unashamed pleasure. Here, packaging is often the product itself. The buyer is giving the box as much as what's inside. Bad packaging kills the perceived value of the product, regardless of its actual quality. And let's be honest, originality is not at the heart of this market; there's real space for it.
Dietary supplements and nutrition. Every day brings a new brand. With white-label labs proliferating, brands are launching one after another. Branding is often sloppy, but sometimes an exception comes along. Beyond that, it's a sector that suffers from a structural lack of trust; it's difficult to trust it at first glance. Branding must simultaneously reassure about quality, legitimize the brand in a market perceived as opaque, and differentiate itself in a visual universe dominated by pharma codes or sports codes (although good branding does emerge). Here, the balance is difficult; few brands truly find it, and there's real strategic work to be done.
Baby and child products. The real target is not the child. It's the parent. And the parent is willing to pay more if the branding tells them that this product has been carefully designed for their child. Trust is built primarily through visual identity.
Wines, spirits, and premium beverages. The sector where branding has always had the most weight. A bottle is often chosen by its label. In e-commerce, this is even truer: without the bottle in hand, it's solely the visual that sells. Estates, houses, and distilleries that neglect their brand identity are leaving considerable margins on the table. The codes are aging; no one has really dared to break them yet, but it won't be long.
Organic and natural products. Paradoxically, the sector most behind on branding despite strong growth. The promise of naturalness has been so widely used by everyone that it no longer differentiates anything. Brands that will break through in this sector are those that find an angle beyond "natural" and green colors: a specific use, a strong conviction, an aesthetic that stands out.
Can we really break the market codes that buyers are used to? Yes. If it is well done, thought through, and adapted.
Food Branding and Brand Book: Codes That Work (and Those That Are Outdated)
Take ten food brands launched in the last two years. Look at their packaging. There's a strong chance you'll see the same colors, the same type of font that respects the usual market codes, more or less the same discourse on sourced ingredients, the same promise of naturalness reformulated in ten different ways.
Worse, put them on the same shelf side by side and try to distinguish them, to find their uniqueness, their originality.
All this is no accident; it's the result of a well-known mechanism: when something works, everyone adopts it, copies it. And that's when this code loses all meaning because it ceases to differentiate itself, drowned among all the fake copies.
Food branding is at a particular moment today. The codes that dominated the years 2018-2023 are reaching saturation, big brands are struggling to renew themselves and take risks. Above all, a new generation is emerging with new codes, more current, more social, more addictive. New brands that have understood that you can't differentiate yourself by doing what everyone else does. They are creating a new standard, one expected by all, because, yes, food has long been behind in the field of branding.
Why the Brand Book Is More Critical in Food Than Elsewhere
In food, the buyer makes their decision in a few seconds, often in an environment where they are solicited from all sides. A supermarket aisle or an Amazon results page means dozens of products competing for the same second of attention. In this context, packaging is no longer a detail; it's no longer a necessity for transport or storage; it's what will make all the difference. It is the #1 sales tool; the slightest error costs tens, hundreds, thousands of lost but silent sales. Silent because no one can measure how many sales were lost this way, and yet, this is the heart of the problem.
And in e-commerce food, the constraint is even stronger. The packaging must work as a miniature photo on a product page, as a square visual on an Instagram feed, as a clickable image on a Meta ad. Three different formats, three different legibility constraints, one single identity to maintain. It must inspire desire at any stage, in any format, and above all, allow for strong brand expression, regardless of the context. Again, too many founders vastly underestimate the power of packaging to sell (or lose sales).
What food branding concretely does: first, it creates desire, it attracts, then, it shows its difference, its uniqueness. It creates a demand, a need, an emotion; the buyer will want this product and no other.
Once attention is gained, it creates recognition that facilitates effortless repurchase, recognition. It justifies a premium positioning in a sector where price competition is constant (no one can today launch a startup and compete with low-cost brands). It builds a visual territory that differentiates it from competitors.
Food is a peculiar field; you can't taste the product directly in the store; you "taste" it through the only possible means: the packaging, and therefore the branding.
Food Codes That Are Saturated in 2025
These codes worked. They were adopted en masse precisely because they worked. Today they have become category signals, not brand signals. They say "I am a food brand" without saying who you are. And that's exactly the problem.
Kraft Paper and Earth Tones
Kraft paper and earthy color palettes dominated artisanal and natural food branding for years. The intention was good: to signal authenticity, closeness to raw materials, and a rejection of the shiny plastic of the classic agro-industry.
Except that today, a brand arriving with these codes no longer says "I am authentic." It says "I looked at the same Pinterest references as everyone else." The organic aisle has become an ocean of kraft. The buyer no longer differentiates. They choose based on price or a product they already know. In other words, the branding is no longer doing its job.
Handwritten Fonts
Handwritten typography signaled homemade, handed-down recipes, artisanal craftsmanship. It worked when it was rare. It is now everywhere. On jams, biscuits, granolas, sauces, teas: the same signal of craftsmanship with the same graphic tools.
A handwritten font on food packaging in 2026 is often a signal that the time was not taken to build a real typographic identity. It's a shortcut. And shortcuts are visible.
This doesn't mean you can no longer use handwritten fonts, but not as before, not as too many brands use it, in an outdated way, simply betraying the age of the brand and the years passing without being able to truly adapt to the market.
Naturalness as the Main Promise
All food brands claim to be natural. "No additives," "simple ingredients," "short recipe," "locally sourced": these promises have become the baseline for the sector. They no longer differentiate. They are prerequisites. Displaying them prominently on the packaging is communicating what everyone else already has.
Brands that continue to make this their main argument blend into the mass of those who have exactly the same thing to say. It's not a brand promise. It's a minimum requirement.
Not all brands need to make it a main argument; if there is something better and more suitable to communicate as Key Message 1 for the target, then we go all in!
Botanical Illustrations
Illustrations of hand-drawn plants, herbs, and fruits have invaded premium food packaging. Infusions, olive oils, condiments, chocolates: the same graphic vocabulary everywhere. These illustrations signaled care, detail, craftsmanship. Today they mostly signal that one has looked at the same trends as one's competitors.
Food Codes That Still Work
Clear Information Hierarchy
Design by text is truly a gamble to take for 2026 / 2027. Inspired by cosmetic ranges, it's a hit and differentiates very, very strongly. It's one of the strongest ways to be a top differentiator on today's shelves.
This is not an aesthetic code; it is a strategic decision. Food packaging that clearly states what it is, for whom, and why it's different in under three seconds on the main face converts better than beautiful but confusing packaging.
Hierarchy begins with a simple decision: what should the buyer see first? The answer is never "everything at once." It's either the main promise, the product name, or the emotion to evoke. Not all three at the same size, competing over 40 square centimeters. Brands that understand this build packaging that works at 50 centimeters on a shelf and as a thumbnail on a product page. Others produce packaging that you have to get close to understand. And in e-commerce, no one gets close.
Consistency Between Price Positioning and Visual Codes
The buyer reads the price after seeing the packaging. This visual context conditions what they feel about the number. A food brand positioned between 8 and 12 euros that uses mass-market visual codes will systematically resist charging that price. Not because the product isn't worth it. But because the packaging hasn't done the preparatory work. Branding justifies the price before the customer reads it. Or it sabotages it.
Typography as Brand Territory
Food brands that have invested in their own consistent typographic system build recognition that does not depend on colors or illustrations. Typography works in black and white, on complex surfaces, in very small as well as very large sizes. It is the most resilient and versatile identity system. Brands with a true typographic territory do not need to accumulate codes. Their typography already says who they are.
Foundational Storytelling Rooted in Real Conviction
The true story of the founder, distinctly and specifically formulated, still works very well in food. Not the generic storytelling "I wanted to create something good and natural." Storytelling rooted in real frustration, a precise market observation, a conviction that no one else shares in exactly the same way. This type of storytelling is difficult to copy because it belongs to someone. That is its strength.
The Mega Logo
There's no need to stake everything on a huge display of one's logo if one has a true brand. If the brand book has been well-developed and the visual identity is well-translated, then there is no reason for the logo to be the first visual information in the UX hierarchy.
This is primarily the method used by large corporations to distinguish themselves from other brands because they simply don't have many other means of recognition; in their segment, all visual cues blend together, making it impossible to recognize a brand by its visual codes.
What Creates True Differentiation in Food Today
True differentiation does not come from a visual code. It comes from a brand strategy that precedes all visual decisions. The codes are merely the visual translation of strategic decisions already made: who the target really is, what territory the brand wants to occupy, what emotion it wants to evoke, what it refuses to do like its competitors.
Positioning Rooted in a Specific Use
Food brands that occupy a precise moment or use in the lives of their target create a memorable association that generalist brands cannot build. A brand positioned for the amateur athlete's lunch, for the picky child's snack, for the aperitif of someone who wants to impress effortlessly: these positions are defensible and memorable. Brands that position themselves for "everyone, all the time" do not create any strong association. They are present on the shelves and absent from people's minds.
An Assumed Stance in the Market
Food brands that dare to take a decisive stance in their sector create a tribe. Not a clientele. A tribe of people who share this conviction and recognize themselves in this brand. This type of stance is risky because it excludes. It tells some people "this brand is not for you." And that is exactly what makes it powerful for those for whom it is. A brand that wants to please everyone truly pleases no one. This is as old as branding itself, and yet, it is still the main mistake.
Total Consistency Between Product and Identity
The food brands that create the most lasting differentiation are those where the product and identity tell exactly the same story. The buyer who receives the product finds no dissonance between what the packaging promised and what the tasting experience delivers. This consistency creates the strongest loyalty: that of a buyer who was pleasantly surprised. And no advertising budget can replace that.
What We See Coming in Food Branding
These are not predictions. These are observations from markets more advanced than the French market, particularly American and British, which generally arrive in France with an 18 to 24-month lag.
Expressive and assertive typography. Food brands using bold display typographies, sometimes aggressive, breaking with the soft and reassuring register dominating the category. This is not an aesthetic trend. It's a strategy of differentiation by contrast in a visually uniform environment.
High-contrast colors. After years of earthy and desaturated palettes, food brands are arriving with bold, high-contrast palettes, almost incongruous in their category. A granola brand in black and white. An artisanal sauce in electric blue. These choices work because they create visual disruption in an overly uniform aisle.
Radical graphic minimalism. Fewer elements, no texture, no illustration, just the product name and a strong color code. This register has so far belonged more to lifestyle and cosmetic brands. It is starting to appear in food on premium segments, carried by brands that trust the power of their name and positioning.
Radical transparency regarding composition. Not "additive-free" in small print on the side. Composition at the heart of the visual identity, embraced, displayed, explained. Brands that make transparency a true brand territory rather than a legal mention.
"In food, the brands that will last are those with a true point of view on their category, not those that copied the current codes with the most care. Codes change. The point of view, however, is defensible over time."
Cynthia, co-founder of Wiiv
How to Build Distinctive Food Branding
And above all, forget market codes! Don't build a brand based on what already exists, what's already being done, what the competition has done, but on the brand itself, its DNA, its purpose, and its target!
The short answer: by doing the strategic work before the graphic work. What the brand is, who it's really talking to, what it wants them to feel, how it differentiates itself: all these decisions must be made and documented in a solid brand book before a graphic designer opens their software.
A strong brand book is the starting point. It ensures that visual decisions stem from real strategy, not from trends or personal preferences. For food brands that already have packaging but feel that something isn't working, our article on why your packaging isn't selling identifies the most common reasons.
For brands starting from scratch or considering a redesign, the free branding diagnostic provides an objective initial assessment. And the online quote generator provides an estimate calibrated to the nature and complexity of the project.
Frequently asked questions: food branding and brand book
What visual codes should be avoided in food in 2025?
Kraft and common tones used without strategic justification, generic handwritten fonts, repetitive botanical illustrations, and overly broad promises of naturalness. These codes are not bad in themselves. They are saturated. They no longer differentiate in a sector where everyone uses them. The real question is not "is this code trendy" but "does this code say something specific about my brand".
Can a food brand still use kraft?
Yes, if it is a justified strategic choice and not an imitation of a trend. If the brand's positioning and its real target audience call for these codes, they can work. What no longer works is using them by default because "that's what everyone does". The question to ask is: do these codes say something specific about my brand, or do they make me blend into the crowd?
What is the difference between food branding and food packaging?
Packaging is the physical container and its graphic design. The food branding book covers everything that precedes and determines this packaging: positioning, target audience, promise, visual territory, tone of voice. Good packaging without solid branding may seem coherent but lacks direction. A solid brand book ensures that packaging, website, advertisements, and social media tell the same story.
How do I know if my food branding is distinctive?
The simplest test: cover your brand name on your packaging. Is the rest enough to identify that it's your brand and not a competitor's? If not, the identity is not yet distinctive enough. The second test: show your packaging to people who don't know your brand. Can they tell in a few seconds who it's for, at what price point, and what emotion it should evoke? If the answers are vague, there's work to be done.
When should I invest in professional food branding?
Before the first packaging run, if possible. The cost of a redesign after producing thousands of units is always higher than the cost of solid branding at the outset. For brands that have already launched and feel that something is hindering growth, the free diagnostic quickly identifies whether the problem comes from branding.
Does Wiiv work with e-commerce food brands?
Yes. The food sector is one of Wiiv's preferred sectors. Wiiv is a branding and packaging agency based in Paris, operating in Bordeaux, Lyon, and Milan. We support e-commerce food brands of all sizes, from launch to structuring for distribution, with an approach that places brand strategy and the brand book before any graphic decision.
