Image Credit : Bifrost Foods
Project Overview
The goal with the project was to reinvent and re-market the world famous, classic English meal of fish and chips, and bring out a healthier version in the form of a ready to eat snack, where the fish is dried, not fried. The outcome is a 100gram/3.5OZ super-snack meal, fully natural, from sustainable resources, packed with 27 grams of protein. A perfect grab & go meal.
Organisation
Team
The team consist of two people, Runar Omarsson, the founder/creative director of Bifrost Foods, an Icelandic startup that focuses on healthy, natural consumer food products, and his friend, Birgir Omarsson (not related), the graphic designer.
The goal with the project was to reinvent the world famous, classic English meal of fish and chips, and bring out a healthier version where the fish is dried, not fried. The outcome is a 100gram/3.5OZ super-snack meal, fully natural, from sustainable resources, packed with 27 grams of protein. The product was launched in fall 2020, and has proved to be a major hit in its home country of Iceland, hopefully reaching other countries in 2021.
Project Brief
An Icelandic mountain biker/surfer and entrepreneur got fed up (literally) with trying to live on "power-bars" on mountain bike trips in the highlands of Iceland. He wanted "real food". Combining his several years of experience in brand building, product development and global marketing with good access to sustainable fisheries and interest in food, the idea of reinventing the classic meal of fish and chips as a light-weigh but nutritious snack was born on a mountain bike trip in 2017.
Icelanders are more or less raised on fish, in any form. The tradition of drying fish as a way of preserving its quality to enjoy later (to survive over the long and cold winter) is as old as the nation itself. Dried fish is 84% protein and weighs almost nothing. It is truly a natural super-food. Potatoes are not only the most popular snack world-wide (crisps or chips) but also the most common thing to eat with fish.
The whole world knows the "fish and chips" meal. Will the whole world like to try the Bifröst Fish & Chips? We'll see !
Project Innovation/Need
We have managed to take a centuries-old food tradition that has been criticised for not being healthy enough, and put a very healthy twist on it, under a globally known term for a great meal.
Design Challenge
It was a combination of all those things. Understanding the market's needs was a fundamental base layer. On top, it was interest in using local, sustainable and healthy products to create something new. Ultimately, it has a lot to do with timing. The market has been moving towards faster food, but is now also looking at health, nature and sustainability.
Effectiveness
Young skateboarders, old golfers, cross-fit people, they all love it! Like the English saying goes: "The proof is in the pudding". The team at Bifrost Foods originally had plans to focus on creating an export product, but was pleasantly surprised to see how the locals in Iceland reacted to the product. The creator of the product was not sure if he would be getting any interest at all from the locals, since dried fish is a very old tradition, and he thought that perhaps it was not something that people would like to be fiddled with. But this combination of dried fish and potato chips, that are both from sustainable resources, has quickly gained popularity on the home-market of Iceland.
Tags
Graphic Design - Three Dimensional
This award celebrates creative and innovative design in traditional or digital visual representation of ideas and messages used in packaging. Consideration given to: clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience; the approach, including marketing and branding concerns, the dynamics of the retail environment, environmental considerations, and legal requirements; the component parts of packaging graphics such as colour rationalisation, information layout, feel and tone of illustration and photography, and finishes, and how they are used in isolation and in relation to each other; and the relationship to the anatomy of the structural design.
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