Little Dish Pots and Pies

Creative Agency: Pearlfisher
Founding Partner & Chief Creative Officer: Jonathan Ford, Pearlfisher
Managing Director: Darren Foley, Pearlfisher
Strategy Business Director: Jack Hart
Design Director: Fiona John, Pearlfisher
3D Design Director: Mike Beauchamp, Pearlfisher
Technical Project Manager: Jenny Cairns, Pearlfisher
Designer: James Taylor, Pearlfisher
Client Manager: Lucy Moss
Project Type: Produced, Commercial Work
Location: UK

Having worked in partnership with nutritionist and Mum, Lucy Jones, to create a new range of nutritionally balanced pots and pies, Little Dish turned to Pearlfisher to develop a vision, voice and series of packaging structures that would bring the nutritional credentials of the new meals to the fore.

Jack Hart, Strategy Business Director at Pearlfisher, said, “The challenge we faced was to better connect parents to the brand’s mission of “feeding healthy kids” by showcasing how healthy Little Dish meals are as fresh and convenient alternatives to the processed trays and pouches available in the children’s aisle. We needed to reframe the consumer relationship with the brand and, as such, established a set of segmentation principles from which we created a reassuringly eclectic mix of products that felt homely, authentic and diverse but still held together as a range.”

Taking inspiration from colourfully-enamelled cookware and the kitchen cupboard, Pearlfisher Strategy defined creative principles for Little Dish across six key equities: colour, texture, labelling, graphics, the role of form and the already appropriated family of “zoo crew” characters. Using this and deep immersions into Little Dish’s food preparation and packaging processes as blueprints for design, Pearlfisher’s 3D and graphic teams reintroduced cohesion and visual excitement to the range, managing to maintain the specialness of the Little Dish brand while establishing cues around quality, wholesomeness and health.

Mike Beauchamp, 3D Design Director at Pearlfisher, said, “We used form, colour and material finish to hero the new Little Dish brand experience. The ‘pot’ and ‘pie’ containers are a first of their kind, with bespoke shape, colour, surfacing and embossed detailing on unique handles to communicate the brand’s premium quality and drive ultimate differentiation on shelf. We used the card sleeve to talk to both parents and kids: a deli-style sticker on the side of pack helps parents navigate stacked meals on-shelf, leaving the entire top face for kids to see Mabel the Cow skipping with a spaghetti string or Charlie the Chicken juggling butternut squashes. Graphically, we assigned bold colours to different protein sources to help with product identification and used handwriting cues to emphasise the youthful naiveté of the brand.

Little Dish co-founder Hillary said of the redesign, “The Little Dish brand identity was born in the Pearlfisher building, and over the last ten years it has gone from strength to strength. Therefore, they were the only partners we trusted to help us take our brand into the future. What Pearlfisher has done is category-defining. They have brilliantly captured the spirit of the Little Dish brand, celebrated our nutritional credentials and repositioned our meals to parents looking for healthy and convenient meals for their little ones.”

The Pots and Pies will be available nationwide in Great Britain from September 1st.

What's Unique?
Having become the icon of the children's food aisle in Britain, Little Dish looked to challenge once again by setting a new standard of health for the category. Ten years after Pearlfisher first created Little Dish, the brand turned to us to develop a vision, voice and series of packaging structures that would bring the nutritional credentials of their new range - Pots and Pies - to the fore.