For our San Mauro food packaging project we have been awarded the much-coveted Red Dot as part of the Red Dot Award: Communication Design 2016, the globally renowned design competition. In sessions that lasted several days, the 26 experts on the Red Dot jury evaluated each of the large number of entries individually, live and on site. This year saw designers and companies from a total of 46 countries take part in the award.

San Mauro is well established as a high qualitative brand of Italian olive oil, and was expanding into luxury food products for which this special packaging was developed. Concept, 3D construction, as well as the graphic design, was created by VHD. The new products, in need for this new packaging were; artichokes in olive oil and an artichoke paste. Since these are real delicatessen, the quality and luxurious nature needed to be visual, as well as the well-established Italian look and feel of the branding. “We got our inspiration from the 2 main ingredients, artichokes and olive oil”, says Rob van Heertum, Strategy Director and partner at VHD. “We based the packaging strategy on the collaboration of 2 ingredients. In principle, 2 ingredients give you 1 amazing end product and this is exactly what we wanted to create with the packaging. A packaging concept that also exists out of 2 separate parts that perfectly fit together and present as 1 perfect package to the consumer”. Next to a glass jar, holding the product, a slide-on box was created, which perfectly matches the jar, and really symbolises the symmetry between the real ingredients, keeping aesthetics high and creating extra added value.

“The increasingly international nature of our competition is proof of its growing reputation in the global design world”, says Prof. Dr. Peter Zec, founder and CEO of Red Dot. “We are very happy with this year’s competition and are delighted at the very high standard of the award-winning projects from around the world. In today’s world, communication designers have become the catalyst between the worlds of language, economics and technology, in other words, they are the engines of progress. More than ever before, we want to be a driving force for development and trends in the sector and give established as well as up-and-coming designers the opportunity to find and claim their place in the market. The Red Dot seal of quality, known around the world to stand for a high level of design, helps them to achieve this.”

Award ceremony and exhibition
The laureates will be honoured on 4 November 2016 in Berlin where the Red Dot Gala will take place in the Konzerthaus Berlin for the sixth time in succession. Afterwards, the Red Dot prize winners will be celebrated at the Designers’ Night in the E-Werk Berlin. Here, for one night only, the exclusive winners’ exhibition “Design on Stage” will be presented at which Red Dot will also be showing the award-winning XXX project.

The Red Dot Design Award
The origins of the Red Dot Design Award date back to 1955. The now internationally renowned name and brand of the competition were developed by Prof. Dr. Peter Zec in the 1990s. The “Red Dot” has established itself internationally as one of the most coveted seals of quality for good design. In order to be able to properly evaluate the wide range of design projects, the award is sub-divided into three competitions: “Red Dot Award: Product Design”, “Red Dot Award: Communication Design” and “Red Dot Award: Design Concept”, each of which is held once a year. The Red Dot Award documents the most incisive trends around the world in everything from products to communication projects, packaging to design concept and prototypes. The award-winning designs are exhibited in the Red Dot Design Museums.
www.red-dot.org