Orkla Foods Romania
Brand and design strategy across a portfolio of local food brands
Orkla Foods Romania was not built; it was assembled. Part of Norway’s Orkla Group — one of the largest companies on the Oslo exchange — it became a leading Romanian food business by buying up local companies (Topway in 2002, then Royal Brinkers and Ardealul in 2005), inheriting with them a grab-bag of well-loved but unmanaged brands, spread across every price tier and facing global competitors for shelf space. The strategic problem was not any single logo; it was the portfolio. Brandient’s relationship with Orkla began early — with a 2004 packaging-led credentials engagement built on the idea of building brands through packaging — and deepened year on year, formalizing in 2009 into the work of turning that scattered inheritance into a coherently managed house.
The discipline was a brand-by-brand judgment: what equity to preserve, and what to modernize or extend. The most substantial thread was Tomi, the established ketchup. Brandient re-anchored the brand on the category’s core benefit, taste, and on its leadership and familiarity — the single greatest asset of being the ketchup Romanians already knew and trusted — and used that accumulated equity as a platform: modernizing the packaging around an ownable, instantly recognizable bottle silhouette and opening room for the brand to stretch into adjacent sauces rather than chase novelty. The thinking resolved in an updated brand platform — Tomi turns ordinary into excitement, a warm, witty, optimistic personality — and a full-range packaging relaunch, with dedicated health (reduced- and zero-sugar) and kids’ (Tomi cel Viteaz — "Tomi the Brave") lines carved out so the masterbrand could speak with one confident, grown-up voice while still recruiting the next generation.
For the margarine business, the move was a carefully phased, research-gated migration to consolidate a much-loved line under the Unirea masterbrand without losing the buyers it had earned. Rather than switch packs overnight, Brandient demoted the legacy Bunica name to an endorsing role and staged the transition in steps across roughly a year, dialing Unirea up as Bunica receded, with recognizability and trust verified along the way so the leader never disoriented its loyal, aging base. On the Frühstück range, Brandient brought naming and brand-architecture discipline — making the brand name read clearly for Romanian shoppers, and holding line extensions under a coherent masterbrand rather than letting them multiply on their own.
The same logic ran across the rest of the portfolio — Wiesana repositioned on a freshness-and-quality promise to carry its margarine up into the mainstream, the economy lines (Linco, LaMinut), the much-loved pâté Ardealul, and a traditional-foods range, Bunătăți de la Bunica — each handled on its own merits but to one consistent standard. Throughout, packaging was treated not as decoration but as a primary brand-building vehicle, and positioning was grounded in genuine category benefits and earned familiarity rather than novelty for its own sake: protect what the brands had earned, sharpen what the shelf demanded, and make the whole portfolio behave as a managed asset rather than a pile of acquisitions.
Client:
Orkla Foods Romania
Industry:
Food and Beverages
Project type:
Brand and Portfolio Architecture
Date:
2004–2012
Services:
Brand Positioning
Brand and Portfolio Architecture
Brand Name, Narratives and Voice
Logo and Visual Identity Program
Packaging Design
Communication Design
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