Bunătăți de la Bunica
The margarine migration — brand equity managed as a balance-sheet asset
The engagement was a brand migration: moving Orkla’s margarine from the trusted Bunătăți de la Bunica name to a new premium tier — without losing the buyers whose trust made the move possible.
Bunătăți de la Bunica, "Grandmother’s Goodies," was the most resonant traditional-foods brand in Orkla Foods Romania’s local portfolio: a grandmother’s promise of honest, home-style cooking that had earned strong trust and reached across several categories, from pate and mustard to sauces and savory pastries. It was, by the company’s own reading, a more visible and more memorable asset than several of the corporate marques that sat beside it. That strength set the real business question Brandient was brought in to answer.
The company wanted to lift its margarine into a new, clearly premium tier and carry it under the corporate Unirea name as Unirea Suprem. The difficulty was not design but equity. Bunica’s margarine already held loyal buyers, and the brand sat a notch above Unirea in the shopper’s mind; moving those customers across to a newer name risked exactly the loss a board fears most. Brandient framed the mandate plainly: complete the transfer with zero loss of market share, and ideally win new buyers, because consumers in any brand migration tend to feel something is being taken from them, not given.
Brandient’s answer was to treat the move as a staged architecture problem rather than a relaunch. Instead of switching the pack overnight, the work designed a year-long, weekly-monitored migration in which the two brands shared the pack and traded places by degrees, Unirea growing as Bunica receded, with Bunica deliberately kept on as the endorser that vouched for the new line. Bunica’s recognized quality became the warrant that earned Unirea Suprem its premium claim, so the equity built over years was spent forward into the new brand rather than abandoned. Brandient set out several routes to get there, weighing each by how little recognition it put at risk at every step.
The same discipline shaped the wider Bunătăți de la Bunica identity that anchored the migration’s credibility. Because the proposition was honest, home-style food, the packaging had to make a factory jar feel made at home and read as one family across every category. A warm hand-written script carried the names; a homely green grandmother’s pattern, lifted with a thread of gold, signaled the brand at a glance; a color for each kind let a shopper find a variant without losing the family; and the honest-cooking promise, no preservatives, no colorants, no additives, was turned into plain icons a buyer takes in instantly, so the pack did work the advertising would otherwise have to. The warmest move was the closing courtesy: every jar carried a paper seal printed with Sărut mâna pentru masă, the old Romanian way of thanking whoever fed you, turning an ordinary lid into a small act of gratitude and making the brand’s promise personal.
Held together, the engagement was the case for managing a strong brand as a balance-sheet asset: the equity that made Bunătăți de la Bunica valuable was the same equity used to de-risk the company’s premium ambition, and to keep the trust intact through a change that could easily have spent it. The brand it protected still anchors the company’s traditional-foods range today.
Client:
Orkla Foods Romania
Industry:
Food and Beverages
Project type:
Design Upgrade · Brand and Portfolio Architecture
Date:
2012
Services:
Logo and Visual Identity Program · Packaging Design · Brand Name, Narratives and Voice
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