The New (and Unimproved) Fancy Feast

May 7, 2010

The New (and Unimproved) Fancy Feast

Have you ever experienced the moment when the brand you shop for weekly and are very loyal to goes ahead and completely changes their packaging? You find yourself in a predicament – you still want to buy the product, but ultimately you hate shopping for it now that you have to search the shelves and decipher the new labels to determine what package is hiding your steadfast product.

Well this happened to me recently with my cat food. My cat of 14 years has been eating Fancy Feast for his entire life and really loves it; the variety and portions are perfect for him. A few months ago, as I strolled down the pet food aisle, I was greeted not by the standard Fancy Feast shelf with its color coded, easy-to-shop look, but by a new display that appeared as if it had been repositioned for some specialty market targeting women, with soft gradations and type so tiny that even at 41 I needed readers just to see the flavor. My cat still needed to eat, so I have been doing my best to deal with the on shelf transition.

However, as both a consumer and a package designer, I’m honestly fed up. As a consumer, the brand has completely changed and I can’t find what I’m look for, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not about to irritate my cat or deal with the week of “digestive challenges” that inevitably goes along with a drastic change in diet, I’d switch brands today. As a designer, my goals are to make a product sell on shelf, make it easy to shop for, and ultimately make the consumer happy. Aesthetics, fancy gradations and script types comes next, if appropriate.

The Fancy Feast rebranding and repackaging defies all logic to me, and while I’ll continue to complain, like many consumers, I’ll just have to add an extra five minutes onto my already rushed shopping trips – just to navigate the cat food aisle!