Sprite, Heinz, McDonald’s: Seven Packaging Plays Worth Stealing This Week
Seven packaging moves worth your attention this week:
- Sprite put a symbol back it had quietly removed - and turned it into a cooler-door weapon
- Heinz Brazil wrapped a mayo jar in crochet to convert grandmothers
- Dom Pérignon hid a personalized message inside the bottle’s pour ritual
- McDonald’s turned a meal bag into a fandom media unit
- Fisk and Nobell Foods built a pizza box that reads like a tabloid
- BioPak and Everest replaced a plastic spoon by engineering one into the lid
- Bubblegum Stuff proved you can build an entire brand on the single brief of making people laugh
Sprite: The symbol you left behind is still your asset
The Story: Sprite’s “It’s That Fresh” global platform launched this week across 180 markets, with new packaging hitting shelves now. The refresh, developed with Studio forpeople, returns the Lymon - the brand’s lemon-lime symbol stripped over years of incremental redesigns - fuses it with the bold white wordmark as a single hero asset, and flips the wordmark vertical on cans for cooler-door legibility. The brand’s first sonic identity, developed with producer Mustard, launches alongside the visual system.
Why It’s Interesting: The Lymon’s return is not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. A standalone icon that functions without the wordmark gives Sprite a secondary brand asset that travels across social, point-of-sale, and environments where the full wordmark won’t render. The vertical can orientation solves a real retail mechanic: cans packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a cooler door are read from the side edge, not the face. The sonic identity extends brand reach into audio, where most CPG brands have nothing.
What to Borrow: Before your next redesign, audit what previous redesigns removed. Some of that equity is still alive in consumer memory - and recovering it costs far less than building something new.
Link: The Coca-Cola Company: Sprite launches new global platform ‘It’s That Fresh’
Heinz Brazil: Make the pack fit the culture, not just the shelf
The Story: Heinz Brazil partnered with DAVID São Paulo on the “Grandma’s Darling” campaign, activated March 22. The campaign wraps mayo jars in crocheted jackets - crochet being a deeply embedded domestic craft tradition in Brazilian grandmothers’ homes, where everyday objects from remotes to appliances routinely receive handmade covers. Jars were distributed as gifts at point of sale, a bus stop on Avenida Paulista was transformed into a fully crocheted installation, and a digital component taught followers to make their own crochet jar covers via creator-led tutorials.
Why It’s Interesting: Heinz did not decorate the jar for Brazilian grandmothers. It adopted a material that already signals love and care in their world and placed its product inside that context. That is a fundamentally different brief. The physical packaging change is the activation, not an add-on to it.
What to Borrow: Find the material, craft, or domestic tradition that already means something in your target market. Then ask whether your packaging could wear that material rather than print a reference to it.
Link: Dieline: Heinz Brazil uses crochet to endear grandmothers to mayonnaise
Dom Pérignon: Hide the message. The unboxing is the gift.
The Story: Design agency Knockout launched an in-store personalization system for Dom Pérignon on March 24, rolling out at Charles de Gaulle airport and luxury department stores globally. A concealed shield is integrated into the closure and only becomes visible when the bottle is turned during the pour. Opening the shield reveals the personal message.
Why It’s Interesting: Personalization at luxury level has been almost entirely additive - an engraved sleeve, a visible label, a sticker on the neck. This approach removes the personalization from view entirely. The moment of uncovering is tied to the ritual of use, which means the gift is experienced twice: once when received, and once when opened.
What to Borrow: Map your packaging’s consumption sequence - the pour, the tear, the lift, the first sip. Ask whether any moment in that sequence could carry a message that only appears at exactly the right time.
Link: Formes de Luxe: Dom Pérignon banks on quiet luxury with in-store personalized packaging
McDonald’s x Netflix: The meal is the media unit
The Story: Announced March 24, launching at U.S. McDonald’s on March 31. Two dueling adult meals built around rival groups from Academy Award-winning animated film KPop Demon Hunters each come with themed packaging, a collectible photocard, and a QR-coded Derpy access card. Scanning the code in the McDonald’s app unlocks exclusive digital content.
Why It’s Interesting: Photocard collecting is a well-established ritual in K-pop fan culture. McDonald’s did not explain this to its customers. It built the mechanism and let fans recognize it. Every meal becomes a fandom artifact. The packaging is the entry point to the entire loop.
What to Borrow: If your limited-edition packaging is only collectible, you have built half the mechanic. Build the other half: what action does owning this pack enable that owning a regular pack does not?
Fisk x Nobell Foods: Build a zine, not a label
The Story: Design studio Fisk and plant-protein company Nobell Foods launched a pizza box designed as a tabloid zine on March 25. Typography pulls from DIY flyers, condensed newspaper headlines, and late-night corner shop signage. The box treats pizza as a cultural subject worth documenting and celebrating rather than a product worth selling.
Why It’s Interesting: Most secondary packaging asks what is the minimum information required on this surface. Fisk and Nobell asked what point of view does this brand have, and can the box argue it. Secondary packaging is the largest printed brand surface in food delivery and the one most frequently treated as dead space.
What to Borrow: Audit your secondary packaging for editorial point of view. Not messaging - point of view. If the box had to stand alone as something worth reading, what would it say?
Link: Dieline: Fisk brings the pizza tabloid to life
BioPak x Everest: The spoon in the lid is the brand statement
The Story: BioPak and Australian ice cream brand Everest launched FSC-certified paper ice cream cups this month across national airlines, convenience stores, and QSR outlets, replacing plastic. A custom-designed birchwood spoon, engineered to fit inside the lid, eliminates individual plastic spoons entirely.
Why It’s Interesting: Most packaging sustainability moves subtract something - a layer, a material, a gram of plastic. This one added a component that became the brand signature. When the product innovation and the sustainability claim are the same physical object, you do not need to explain your values separately.
What to Borrow: Which component attached to your primary pack could be redesigned as a brand feature rather than a utility afterthought? The spoon, the lid, the handle, the closure - each one is a branded surface that most brands leave blank.
Link: PKN Packaging News: BioPak, Everest launch paper cups with spoon
Bubblegum Stuff: Delight is a brand strategy, not a feature
The Story: Studio Chong’s rebrand for UK novelty goods company Bubblegum Stuff launched on Dieline March 26, as the brand pivots from wholesale supplier to standalone D2C brand. The identity introduces a character-based mascot system, anchors the portfolio in Sunshine Yellow, and commits to a brief that removes every functional claim and leads entirely with personality.
Why It’s Interesting: Most CPG brands carry two briefs - the functional one and the emotional one. Bubblegum Stuff has one. Delight is the strategy, the creative brief, and the product selection filter simultaneously. That clarity is harder to maintain at scale than it appears.
What to Borrow: Write your packaging brief down to one sentence. Not a headline - a filter. If every element on your pack does not serve that sentence, it should probably come off.
Link: Dieline: Studio Chong’s Bubblegum Stuff refresh sticks to silly fun
Ready to bring these ideas to life across your portfolio? Contact 3D Color at bob.jennings@3dcolor.com to see how rapid packaging comps and color-perfect samples can help you seize cultural moments, test new formats, and accelerate your next big idea.
