Restraint in a Box: It's Taaaasteful!
Safeway Cereal Won't Clash With the China

By Linda Hales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 26, 2006

For a half-century, the cereal aisles of supermarkets have been stacked high with screaming, crayon-bright packages that defy not only sunglasses but also the best practices of contemporary graphic design.

Despite the success of design-driven brands such as Apple, Target and Starbucks, the amusement park of Mini-Swirlz and Cookie Crisps has remained immune to the clean, serene signage of modern life. Kellogg's continues to let its bilious yellow boxes of Corn Pops explode in a bizarre, '50s-style pow of crimson lettering, and packages of Reese's Puffs are so garish they could hold their own on the Las Vegas Strip.

Generations of Americans have been subjected to this cardboard jumble in the store, and at home, the cereal box has persisted as a breakfast-time billboard. But a good billboard is a terrible thing to waste.

So it's a great relief to see a major design upgrade on the shelves at Safeway. Its new house brand, O Organics, comes in a package so gorgeously restrained that it looks like a mistake. The box has no movie-land pirates to wow kids and no promises of weight loss for expanding boomers. There's a photo of flakes in a simple white bowl. The only pitch -- the word "organic" -- is writ large under a thin blue "O"; for backdrop, a delicious ribbon of color flows from tangerine to lime.

Brian Dowling, spokesman for O Organics, declined to explain the low-key approach for the brand, which debuted this past spring in products throughout the store. He would say, though, that preliminary feedback has been good.

"The boxes are beautiful," said Marion Nestle, nutrition expert and author of "Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health" (2002) and "What to Eat" (2006), who spotted them in New York.

A longtime observer of the genre, Nestle described cereal packaging as "food marketing at its most aggressive and vanguardish." Nestle, who teaches at New York University, knew of no academic studies supporting a link between design and sugar content, but she has her own way of relating the two.

"I advise people to buy cereal in really dull packages on the top shelf," Nestle said. " If you want a healthy cereal, you pick one that is very subdued."

Few are.

"It's a race to the bottom," complained Michael Bierut, a graphic designer with the international design firm Pentagram.

Bierut likens the cereal box zeitgeist to tabloid magazine covers. In both cases, "these people would claim to be competing for eyeballs," he said. "Their idea is that the only way to prevail is to make it bigger, to scream louder."

The potential for eyestrain is worse with cereal than with toothpaste -- another category in graphic distress -- because cereal boxes find their way right onto the breakfast table.

"It's almost like a centerpiece," said Joe Duffy of Minneapolis-based Duffy & Partners, which designed a highly regarded logo for Kellogg's Smart Start. "Packaging is a statement. You bring it into your home. Wouldn't we all prefer something that looks good instead of something obnoxious?"

A centerpiece should not say: "Drop a jean size."

Washington designer Neal Ashby uses cereal boxes as examples in the graphic design course he teaches at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. He pointed out that designers often work in a vacuum, "designing just that box. You forget it's competing with everything else."

Or that it might end up decorating the breakfast bar.

"It's all about the battle for impulse buy," Ashby said. "Promise them anything."

Big brands such as Kellogg and General Mills decline to identify their designers, so it's hard to assign blame for the visual cacophony. Cereal boxes have been this way since the 1950s, though, when the Leo Burnett advertising agency advised the Kellogg company to treat the box as a magazine cover and the aisle as a newsstand, according to "Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal," by Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford.

Chee Pearlman, former editor of I.D. magazine, came across that tale while preparing a cover story on "the intense manipulation and the intense graphics" of cereal packaging. "They all have this special dynamism, keeping everything in motion so it's all alive and moving," she said.

There is plenty of rationale for revision, if a company wants to take a calculated risk.

Although more than 90 percent of U.S. households purchase cold cereal, the $7 billion business is flat as a pancake as companies face a declining consumer base. And the market research firm Mintel projects no growth through 2010, partly because more people are reaching for breakfast foods that can be eaten on the go.

Most cereal companies have responded by using every digital design trick -- morphing type, flashier colors, holograms, foil paper, free gifts and licensed characters -- to stop shoppers in their tracks.

That approach feeds conventional wisdom that children won't eat if boxes can't compete with Saturday morning cartoons or video games. But in a survey of shoppers, Mintel found that more than half the women who make the buying decisions said they were not influenced by characters on the box, or by pleas from their children. (Men were twice as likely to be persuaded by the box or the child -- but they were less likely to be in the store in the first place.)

What better ammunition for trying a new approach? In the aisle at Safeway, with every other package screaming for attention, the quiet blue "O" makes a graceful, tasteful statement of its own.

Time will tell, though, whether the "O" design survives. Duffy's concept for Smart Start was equally radical and beautiful in 1998, when Kellogg's spent $30 million to launch the multigrain flakes in a simple white box. But the design lasted only until a new brand manager arrived.