I was asked to give a CEO my professional opinion on their brand’s packaging design.

Some people find it uncomfortable to share unwelcome truths. I consider it my job.

My opinion had zero uncertainty:
You are living in the painful valley of the messy middle. 
Not fully committed to being a quirky challenger brand.
And not conforming to category codes either.
Pick a path and redesign.

They hired us to do it for them.

Here’s the story behind Mind Control’s rebrand of Fresh Fodder.

Every rebrand has a crucial decision point.

The term “rebrand” gets thrown around so loosely that every minor packaging update is now called “rebrand” with dramatic fashion.

I was taught in uni that a “rebranding” means to reposition your brand in the mind of the consumer - shifting what it means. Not how it looks. 

To deal with this widespread misunderstanding of what a rebrand is, we usually walk clients through their rebrand options.

We call it the Rebrand Spectrum. It runs from “evolution” to “revolution”.

Importantly, choosing between these options is less about how you think the brand should look now, and more about what you’re going to do after the rebrand.

It generally goes something like this:

Option One: Light evolution.
Refine what’s there, without entirely reinventing it. Maintain the logo, tweak the pack, adjust the claims.

This strategy works if:

• The brand will grow through distribution and in-store visibility, not marketing-led awareness

• There’s no significant media investment or marketing budget available

• The priority is to protect what exists, rather than reposition

• The goal is low-risk, low-friction improvement, not transformation

Option Two: Bold evolution.
Build a proper brand system. This is where we will push creative, likely modify core assets like logos and colours, but maintain an essence of the past.

This strategy works if:

• There’s a clear ambition to build brand equity, not just improve shelf appeal

• You’ll invest in consistent marketing activity - content, social, influencers, PR and shopper campaigns

• The brand needs to compete against bigger players, not just be “different”

• There’s internal alignment to back the brand with budget and visibility over the long term

Option Three: Revolution.
Full brand reinvention. A revolution means everything is on the table. Potentially a new name, completely new look, total repositioning.

This strategy works if:

• There’s significant growth ambition and investment to match

• The brand will be supported by above-the-line, campaign-level marketing

• You want to compete nationally, head-to-head with multinational brands

There are no hard and fast rules. But generally, we find the Rebrand Spectrum helpful in guiding decisions and understanding risk.

It all started with a gangster, a brothel and a pawn shop.

Fresh Fodder is an Aussie dip brand with national distribution. They have a unique Greek-inspired heritage and product line-up of delicious, varied fresh dips.

After a bunch of consumer research, competitive analysis and some strategic decisions about how far to push the rebrand, we aligned on a strategy and set off into design. Fresh Fodder landed firmly in Bold Evolution. The brand already had personality and recognition worth protecting - it just needed a stronger system around it.

Our goals were clear:

1. Strengthen visual consistency across the range to improve shelf presence

2. Fix the mascot legibility - either rebuild it as a true distinctive asset, or rethink its role entirely

3. Dial up quality cues without losing the fun voice

4. Create a visual identity that can stretch outside just dips and into new categories

The challenge wasn’t making Fresh Fodder more professional. It was making it more coherent without stripping away the weirdness that made people care in the first place.

The cutting room floor

One of the saddest parts about running a creative agency is all the ideas that die along the way. Instead of holding a funeral for them, I figured we may as well show you a tiny snippet of what didn’t make it.

I just went back from the original Figma board where we collated all the team’s ideas. We probably worked up over 100 different versions. One of the places we were inspired by was old-school deli meat packaging - those paper wraps with quirky graphics on them that you never really pay attention to but recognise in an instant.

Design that scales

The new masterbrand colours are designed to create faster recognition and more uniformity at shelf. The bold variant colours give us standout and easier navigation at shelf. The overall system made the transition into desserts clean - you can quickly recognise it’s the same brand and we’ve retained the deli-inspired quality cues.

Bringing the brand to life through stills and web

After rolling out packaging, we switched gears to building a website and launch assets.

A successful rebrand doesn’t need to erase everything that came before it.

Fresh Fodder didn’t need a new personality. It already had more personality than most brands on the shelf. It needed a stronger system - one that could make the range easier to recognise, improve quality perceptions and give the brand room to grow.

That’s why it’s s important to choose your place on the Rebrand Spectrum before the design work begins.

Change too little and you carry the same problems forward. Change too much and you risk throwing away the very things people remembered you for.

The job isn’t to make a brand unrecognisable.

It’s to make it feel more like itself.

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