Risotto Tonio — Matarazzo
Matarazzo — university project, new product development (UAI)
Five variants, one system. The colour changes, the architecture doesn't.
The brief
For the same Packaging course, this time in teams, each group was assigned an existing brand and asked to design packaging for a new product — one the brand didn't yet have in its portfolio.
Our group, with Tomi and Mati, got Matarazzo, the pasta brand, and the product to develop was a box of ready risottos, in the vein of what Knorr offers today. We had to create five variants.
Rina already existed. The sub-brand logic didn't need inventing, it needed reworking.
The idea
Researching Matarazzo we found the work behind Rina, the company's premium sub-brand, more sophisticated than the main pasta line. That led to the idea of creating Tonio as a sub-brand for the risottos: following a logic similar to Rina's, but reworked for this new product.
We worked like an outside studio commissioned by an established brand to develop a new product.
Development
We defined five risotto variants, each with its own identification inside the system: Strong Curry, Mediterranean, Four Cheese, Mushroom and Primavera. We researched references from Matarazzo itself and from competitors to understand category codes before designing.
Working on a food product meant applying the full body of legal regulation food packaging requires — information you have to follow to the letter.
Tonio inherits Rina's shield and Matarazzo's register. Same hierarchy, different temperature.
Applications
A variant system is tested side-on: if you can't tell them apart by the edge, they don't exist on the shelf.
Outcome
One of the most complete exercises of the whole course.
What I take from it is having worked as though we were an outside studio commissioned by an established brand to develop a new product. That dynamic, plus the regulatory demands specific to food packaging, meant every graphic decision had to pass a filter that wasn't aesthetic.