Packaging Changes That Support Brand Growth: A Case Study

Teams often go down the road of refreshing packaging, whether graphically or structurally, for a variety of reasons. One of the most common is because the current design feels a little tired and needs to be modernized.

And that can be a very valid reason to update packaging, but if the sole reason to change packaging is because you’re hoping it will drive sales on its own, then that’s a good reason to pause. Packaging, by itself, rarely moves the sales needle. What it does best is reflect what your brand stands for and what it’s trying to do: communicate, make the product easy to use, get found on the shelf, and stand apart from the competition.

Packaging changes that support brand growth look very different from just a cosmetic refresh. Growth comes from pulling a lot of strategic levers across the brand, not from packaging by itself. But when the packaging does a good job of reflecting the overall brand strategy, a refresh can support overall sales growth.

A few years back, Taco Bell Home Originals made exactly the right kind of change — and it’s a clean example of how this is supposed to work. Let’s walk through what they changed, why it mattered, and how it turned out.

The Backstory Behind These Packaging Changes

In case you’re not a regular in the drive-thru: Taco Bell is a national quick-service restaurant chain. But the brand also lives in the grocery aisle. Through Kraft Heinz, a line of Taco Bell products is sold at retail under the name Taco Bell Home Originals, or TBHO. The idea is simple – make your favorite restaurant flavors at home.

There’s a wrinkle, though. Almost all of the brand’s marketing muscle lives at the restaurant level, and that’s where the brand positioning gets set. The grocery business doesn’t define what Taco Bell means to people. The restaurant does. So TBHO is, in a sense, living off equity built somewhere else.

The in-store shopper isn’t quite the same person as the drive-thru regular, either. So, the TBHO team had a balancing act. They wanted to pull their growth target into closer alignment with the restaurant brand, without alienating the loyal grocery shoppers already putting TBHO in their carts.

Packaging was one of several elements the team used to bring those two worlds together. And to pull its weight, the packaging needed to do two things. Disrupt the category and get noticed. And tie clearly back to the restaurant, using the same tone, colors, and equity assets people already recognized. The existing packaging did not do that well. So, there was a real, strategic reason to change the graphics, not just a little cosmetic change.

Testing the Packaging Changes Before a National Rollout

Having a good reason to change the packaging is one thing. Knowing the new design will deliver on that reason is another.

A national graphics change is expensive. It touches every package, every shelf, every distribution point, and once it’s out there, it’s hard and expensive to undo it. So the smart move isn’t to redesign and hope. It’s to find out whether the new direction actually works before you commit to it.

That’s exactly what the TBHO team did. They ran a quantitative test putting the current packaging head-to-head with the new design. The test wasn’t about second-guessing whether the designers had good taste. It was about de-risking a big, hard-to-reverse decision.

Specifically, they wanted to know a few things. Did the new graphics break through the sameness of the aisle? Did tying more closely to the restaurant’s equity make TBHO stand out on the shelf? And was that new look genuinely compelling to the growth target they were chasing, the shoppers they wanted more of?

Those are answerable questions. And answering them before the rollout is a whole lot cheaper than answering them after.

The Results

The results came back positive across the board.

The connection to the restaurant was strong, and noticeably stronger than it had been with the old packaging. The new design did a better job communicating the specific equity attributes people already associated with Taco Bell. It was easier to find on the shelf, it popped more, it stood out as more differentiated from the competition, and brand recognition was stronger.

There’s a nice little insight buried in that. Awareness of the restaurant was already sky-high. So, when the in-store package leaned into those familiar restaurant equities, shoppers recognized and remembered it faster. The packaging wasn’t building awareness from scratch. It was borrowing awareness that already existed and putting it to work in a new place.

And, importantly, the new design didn’t alienate the existing base. The shoppers already buying TBHO didn’t feel like their brand had been yanked out from under them.

Since the change went live in 2023, TBHO has had continued success, with sales growing steadily since the new graphics launched. The brand was doing other things as well to support the overall strategy, not just the packaging, but it acted as another spark to the growth.

Now, that last sentence might seem to contradict everything I said up top about packaging not driving sales. It doesn’t, though. The new graphics didn’t cause that growth on their own. What they did was remove what had been holding the brand back on the shelf, then let the rest of the brand’s strategy do its job.

Summary: Packaging Changes That Support Brand Growth

When is a packaging change worth it? When it’s done for a strategic reason, and when that reason connects back to what the brand is trying to achieve.

Packaging on its own generally doesn’t drive sales. It earns its keep when it reflects the brand’s positioning, equities, tone, and personality, and when it acts as strong support for everything else the brand is doing. That’s the whole game.

For the TBHO team, this was never about refreshing or modernizing the look, which are the reasons most packaging changes get proposed. It was about going after a growth target. And that goal fundamentally changed what the packaging needed to reflect and communicate. The strategy came first. The design followed.

So, before you greenlight a redesign, ask yourself one question: what is this change actually in service of? If the answer is that the old one feels stale, that’s worth a longer conversation before anyone touches the package. But if the answer ties back to a real growth goal (a new target, a clearer connection to your equity, a genuine shelf problem), then you may be looking at packaging changes that support brand growth. And those are worth making.