Is food packaging becoming more user friendly?

Recently, I’ve been forgetting my lunch – and work has been busy for me to go out. Luckily, the kitchen at the office has been stocked-up with decent frozen foods, which is not ideal, but better than nothing, and certainly better than some crappy snacks. Most of the frozen food at work comes from evol foods, which caught my attention from a banding perspective, mainly because the design of their packaging is very clean and actually useful, here is why:

When you’re about to eat frozen food, the first thing you do is to look at the package for cooking instructions, if you have done this before and you know that you’re going to be using, let’s say microwave, you just want to know the exact cooking time – without reading too much, right?.  It’s very typical that you will expend 3-5 minutes going through the package to find this information, which is annoying. But. these guys actually put this information more front and center, so it’s easy for you to scan the package. What they did, was to use some decent iconography for each cooking method, (e.i. oven, microwave), then added the cooking time for each method, right next to the icon, take a look.

That seems useful, right?. Typically, you see each cooking method with a set of instructions highlighted in bullet points, and I find myself having to read a lot of stuff that feels like they’re trying to up-sale me on their product. The other thing I like about the cooking instructions is the steps, I can clearly find the steps w/o having to read other info.

I’m not saying this is the best design ever, and you should all eat frozen food, all I’m saying is that we designers can make an ordinary experience, like eating frozen food more pleasant, just by paying attention to these sort of things. Design decisions like this can make a huge difference when it comes to building a brand. By the end of the day, the interaction of your audience with your product is what is going to help you build a long, lasting relationship with your users.

My to cents …

Nelson