4 Hard-won lessons from disruptive brand founders and takeways from The London School of Economics Panel with Creative Partner Be Bambridge.
Every food founder remembers the exact moment they realised their packaging wasn’t working. Maybe it was a retail buyer looking at their label and saying, “It tastes amazing, but it looks cheap.” Maybe it was a customer complaining they couldn’t scrape the last bit of sauce out of a beautifully designed but completely impractical square jar.
At a recent live panel hosted by Bonnie (founder of Miso Tasty), four industry insiders stripped back the polished veneer of the food and drink industry. Founders Tom Palmer (Yep Kitchen), Tess Reed (All Dressed Up), Megan Tan (Yumm Singa), and branding expert Be Bambridge (Against Ordinary) sat down to share the messy, expensive, and ultimately rewarding reality of building a brand that stands out on a crowded shelf.
Whether you’re mixing spice blends in your kitchen or preparing for your first supermarket rollout, here is the survival guide to food packaging they wish they’d had.
1. Don’t Let Being "Different" Ruin Your Product's Function
When you’re a tiny startup, the urge to disrupt the shelf is overwhelming. You want a bottle that looks like nothing else in the aisle. But as the panel revealed, the laws of physics and supply chains always win.
The Square Jar Trap
Tom Palmer launched Yep Kitchen to bring the vibrant, spicy flavors of China’s Sichuan province to the UK. Desperate to stand out, he launched his chili oil in a chic, square-based jar.
“I completely lost sight of respect for the function of the product,” Tom admitted. “Very quickly, people started to tell me it was difficult to get the chili oil out of the corners.”
Six months later, Tom swallowed his pride and went back to standard round jars. The lesson? A round jar with a wide lid exists because it works for chunky oils.
The Squeezy Bottle Bottleneck
Tess Reed faced a similar battle with All Dressed Up. She revolutionised her category by putting premium salad dressings into convenient squeezey bottles. It was a massive hit, but function still brought its challenges. When developing a spicy harissa dressing, the thick ingredients kept clogging the nozzle, halting wider distribution. Which meant a different bottle with a flip lid had to enter the range, meaning they no longer have a uniformed look, but each fit for function.
The Takeaway for Founders: Innovation is great, but user experience is king. If a customer has to fight your packaging to eat your food, they won’t buy it a second time.
2. The Step-by-Step Upgrade: From Fiverr to Five Figures
One of the biggest anxieties for early-stage founders is cost. When do I stop bootstrapping and start investing serious capital into branding? The panel mapped out a natural, three-stage evolution:
Phase 1: The Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
When you are testing the waters, keep it cheap. Megan started Yumm Singa as a monthly supper club, using a logo her cousin drew for free in exchange for a few nice meals. Tess spent just £750 on her very first label iteration.
Phase 2: The Freelancer Pivot
As you transition to farmers’ markets and independent delis, you need a professional touch. Tom took a giant leap by commissioning custom artwork from an agency in Hong Kong to capture a retro “firecracker” aesthetic. He initially budgeted £500 to £1,000. The actual cost? £5,000.
“I launched the business with £15,000 total in my mind,” Tom said. “To put five grand on the table for artwork was a terrifying decision. But it was the best decision I ever made. The moment we launched in retail, the products took off because the visual identity was so strong.”
Phase 3: The Retail Reality Check
When All Dressed Up secured a major listing with Waitrose, Tess realised her £1,500 friend-designed label wasn’t sharp enough for a major supermarket aisle. She raised investment and hired a full-service creative agency for a premium rebrand costing between £8,000 and £10,000.
Be’s Take
The biggest reason we see people soming in for a full rebrand or drastic pivot is because they didn’t invest in brand strategy earlier on. Your brand strategy should anchor your visual identity by communicating who you are and what you stand for in a way that your ideal audience will resonate with. As. you grow, you should pivot and tweak but fundamentally what makes you different should be consistent but help build your brand authority and community long term.
The Takeaway for Founders: Don’t stress about having perfect, supermarket-ready packaging on day one. Cringe at your early labels, it’s a sign that you are growing. Save the big money for when your distribution scale demands it. And invest wisely so you aren’t having to do a big spend every few years.
3. Meet Consumers Where They Are (Especially on World Foods)
If your product features a flavour profile that is relatively new to mainstream consumers, your packaging has a double burden: it has to differentiate and educate at the same time.
Megan noted that being a Singaporean brand is a double-edged sword. “On one hand, we’re interesting because we’re different. On the other hand, we’re unfamiliar.” To bridge this gap, she and Be chose a standard jar format that mirrored familiar premium curry brands like Gymkhana, using the structural familiarity to anchor a totally unique flavor.
Be offered a gold-standard rule for breaking into new categories:
“It is so much harder to stand on your own and say, ‘Hey, come join me over here,’ when everyone else is over there. Give them a bridge. Meet them halfway.”
When Yep Kitchen launched their novel Yuxiang (fish-fragrant) stir-fry sauce, they knew UK consumers would be confused. On the packaging, right beneath the unfamiliar name, they printed a bold anchor line: “Ignites with Aubergine.” Instantly, a consumer standing in the aisle knows exactly what to buy alongside the pouch to make dinner. As well a having flavour profiles that the audience would be familiar with “sweet:, “spicy”, “umami”.
4. How to Work with a Designer (Without Losing Your Mind)
When it does come time to hire a branding agency, founders often make the mistake of acting as the art director rather than the client. Be uses a brilliant analogy to explain how to get the most out of your creative partner:
“Treat an agency like a garage or a doctor. You take your car to the garage because it’s making a weird noise. You don’t walk in and say, ‘My cambelt needs changing,’ because you don’t actually know. Tell the agency your problems, not your solutions.”
If you come to a designer demanding a blue bottle simply because your competitor is red, you are self-diagnosing. Instead, tell them: “I am struggling to communicate that my product is premium,” or “Customers don’t understand how to use this sauce.” Let the experts build the visual bridge.
The Golden Rule of Scaling: The Alignment Check
Whether you are printing your first 50 labels on a home printer or ordering 50,000 bespoke pouches from a global manufacturer, your packaging strategy must constantly evolve. The mistake most brands make isn’t starting with “bad” design, it is maintaining an identity that no longer matches their scale.
To thrive at any stage of growth, build a regular check-in around these three vectors:
The Margin vs. Format Reality: Early on, choose readily available, standard components. Do not risk a stock-out or destroy your cash flow trying to look custom before you have the volume to command the supply chain.
The Customer Validation Loop: Never assume your “point of difference” is what consumers actually care about. If you are early stage, get unlabelled test batches into hands at local markets to track raw feedback. If you are scaling into supermarkets, poll your community to ensure your design matches your retail price point.
The Brand Building Payoff: You don’t want to change your packaging too often or you’ll risk losing your brand loyalty from existing customers. Constantly review your brand strategy to ensure it still work against the current cultural & commercial landscape of your category. Investing in brand strategy upfront should minimise excessive spend further down the line.
Is Your Packaging Making the Right Kind of Noise?
Whether your brand is struggling to communicate its premium price point on the supermarket shelf or you are ready to pivot from that scrappy first freelancer design to a full agency rebrand, we are here to help you navigate the jungle.
At Against Ordinary, we challenge your assumptions, uncover your true point of difference, and extract your unique story to turn it into a visual language that converts casual shoppers into brand loyalists.
We know cash flow is king for growing businesses, which is why we offer highly flexible payment terms to help startups and scaling brands get the strategic design they need, right when they need it.
Let’s fix the noise.