Manufacturer: Danone
Agency: Internal
It would be tough to talk about Greek yogurt in the U.S. without mentioning Oikos. Launched by Danone amid the category’s meteoric rise several years ago, the brand quickly became a leader in the space and has enjoyed remarkable momentum. Oikos has already seen how impactful design can be for growth—the core line won a Designalytics Effectiveness Award in 2022. So it’s no surprise that the brand turned its attention to upgrading its Triple Zero packaging.
The Triple Zero brand was introduced in 2015 and catered to a niche segment of consumers looking to balance the benefits of Greek yogurt (notably, protein) with a diet-conscious mindset. Since then, it has become a mainstay in Oikos’ stable of protein-rich yogurts.
When the team began considering a redesign, Triple Zero was performing well—there was nothing to fix. Still, the Oikos team recognized that it was an ideal time to improve the pack. “Our brand is all about getting stronger,” said Lauren Koprowski Bodner, creative director at Danone. “We were doing really well, but we realized that was actually the perfect time to ensure we continued to get stronger.”
From the start of the project, there was agreement that this would not be a major transformation; it was an opportunity to refresh and realign with the rest of the Oikos brand. The team had a difficult balance to maintain: Accentuate what makes the Triple Zero brand unique while visually connecting it to the rest of the Oikos portfolio. The narrow mandate didn’t mean the design team limited their creativity, though. “This was a tight and focused project. We knew that we needed to retain a lot of what was working,” said Kaitlyn Froboese McBride, senior design manager at Danone. “Still, we came up with so many options. We played with every single element on the pack, just to make sure we were exploring as much as possible.”
Triple Zero is predicated on absences—having no sugar, no fat, and no artificial sweeteners is the brand’s key differentiator. Yet part of the creative brief was to focus not just on what the brand didn’t have, but also on what it did have: a considerable amount of protein. “The previous design was rooted in residual diet culture; the triple zeros highlighted what was not in the product,” said Koprowski Bodner. “But there’s also a good amount of protein in Triple Zero, and that was important to highlight.”
The design team at Danone knew that color was a primary tool to unify Oikos’ various product lines and to differentiate them. “Color is a key way to communicate differences from five feet away and beyond,” noted Koprowski Bodner. “It was really important to make sure that we were using that differentiator more effectively on the packaging.”
Both the Triple Zero and Pro variants of Oikos’ portfolio were predominantly black, but a swath of silver served as a distinguishing characteristic for Triple Zero. In fact, silver had become a brand asset, in part because it’s a cue for diet-conscious consumers. (Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, for example, have silver as their primary brand hue.)
Within that silver band was Triple Zero’s unique value proposition—the negative-nutritional trifecta that gave the brand its name. Without this key information, even the product name itself could be confusing. The problem was the visibility of the vertically aligned silver ribbon on the old design: It was off to the side and, in retail environments, was often harder to see.
“The packages are constantly turning on the shelf,” said Froboese McBride. “We look at these designs on the screen all the time, but what we see doesn’t always align with what the actual in-store experience is like.” As the package would turn, the information on the silver band would be harder to see, thus obscuring essential nutritional call-outs and potentially creating confusion between Pro and Triple Zero.
The solution was elegantly simple: shift the silver band from a vertical orientation alongside the brand name to a horizontal one beneath it. The nutrition callouts are also bigger now, and it’s easier to see not only that it’s different from other Oikos varieties (those signature ciphers) but also that Triple Zero has a considerable amount of protein. “Putting all of the compelling facts about the product front and center on the pack was such an important move,” said Koprowski Bodner. “These are the things our consumers care about and what they look for.”
The team at Danone also upgraded the structure of the package itself, moving to a higher-quality substrate that could be consistent across the portfolio. “The printing quality is a bit better now, and it feels sleeker and more modern in your hand,” said Froboese McBride. “Plus, it’s more ownable for Danone, and it just feels a lot more within the design principles of the brand that we have today.”
As with virtually all food categories, conveying taste is of paramount importance, and particularly for Triple Zero. The brand prides itself on providing more craveable flavors, so it prioritized imagery that was appealing and unmistakable. “We scaled up the flavor photography because it’s so vital for this brand,” said Koprowski Bodner. “Taste is a top reason why people buy Triple Zero in the first place.”
As soon as the new design hit shelves, Froboese McBride knew they had a winner. “Of all the redesigns in my career, this one was shared back with me the most,” she said. “When you’re staying relatively close to the original, people often don't notice, which is sometimes the point. But people had such a positive reaction to this one. They took notice in a good way.”
The success of the design was clear in the sales numbers as well, as Triple Zero’s new look seems to have added some zeroes to Oikos’ bottom line. During the six months following its rollout, sales grew by 18% compared to the same period during the prior year (for context, the category only grew by 6.8%). Designalytics’ consumer research affirms this impressive result: When yogurt buyers were asked which design they’d prefer to purchase, 71% selected the new over the old.
Koprowski Bodner felt that keeping an eye on the overall Oikos brand while improving Triple Zero ended up bolstering the whole portfolio. “We were always thinking of it from a portfolio standpoint, rather than just fixing things here and there on the Triple Zero pack. I think that really helped us achieve our goal and positioned the brand well for the future.”