A spice garden on every bag

The old bags had orange bands, a vintage mountain landscape and a different leaf — a look that belonged to another brand, not to Gröna Bladet. The spices inside were good; the bag just didn't tell that story.

We started from one question: what does a spice look like before it reaches the jar? It grows. It's a leaf, a pod, a seed on a vine. So we designed every bag as a small window into the garden it comes from.

With more than 450 products, giving each one its own colour would never stay consistent. So the design stays exactly the same — and the spice does the colouring.

A large, wavy window in the clear film shows the real cayenne, turmeric, peppercorns or mustard seeds. Side by side on a shelf, the range becomes a wall of natural colours, held together by the same green frame.

Around the window grows a small spice garden, drawn in fine engraving-style lines: star anise, a bay leaf branch, garlic, chilli, cardamom and a pepper vine. They frame the window like plants around a garden gate, and they're the same on every bag — so a shopper learns the look once and recognises it everywhere.

In the middle sits the brand's promise, set in a classic serif: "Alltid nya och goda smaker" — always new and good flavours.

A brand green that shifts from one print run to the next quickly stops looking like a brand. So we printed the bags with Pantone direct inks instead of mixing colours in CMYK:

• Pantone 350 C for the illustrations
• Pantone 2265 C for the crimped bands
• Pantone 5665 C and 5803 C for the soft sage and olive shapes
• Black C for the logo and the names

The green on bag number 450 is the same green as on bag number one — and the same as on the jars and the website.

The bag is built as one print template: a 260 × 160 mm flow-wrap with fixed places for the logo, the name in Swedish and Arabic, the back-panel text, storage advice and recycling. For each new spice only the name changes — the garden, the colours and the window stay exactly the same.

For the webshop, stores and social media we made realistic mockups for the range — the bags in the hand, in the kitchen and on the plate, where the design really has to work.