Here in Holland’s ‘marqt’, a knowingly cool modernisation of the Dutch for ‘market’ (markt), pretty much everything on shelf is from small, specialist, often organic brands. As an authentic Dutch staple food, soup is a prime candidate for the ‘made with love from the best ingredients story’, and as with my old favourite Bonne Maman this story is best served without pictures. Small scale and freshness are signalled by stencil or typewriter fonts, with consistency and conformity avoided if at all possible. In fact, why even bother with a logo, that’s so factory!
Takeout: Told you it was an arms race. The ‘Kleinste Soep Fabriek’ (smallest soup factory) does a nice job of combining impact and emotion with hand-typed simplicity, and gets my vote (besides, in very small letters it says its 3x concentrated, so a good carbon footprint too). Then again, that unbranded one’s on Facebook…