150 SKUs, three people and a new regulation
There is a kind of packaging work that never shows up in a portfolio: the back panel. Ingredients, allergens, nutrition table, warnings. It is the most regulated panel on the box, the most expensive one when it comes off the press wrong, and it is what decides whether an entire portfolio can still be sold.
In 2023, on the Puravida line at Nestlé Health Science, that panel became the project.
A portfolio that grew by launch, not by system
The brand sold dozens of supplements that had reached the shelf one at a time, each launch with its own logic of colour, naming and hierarchy. The effect showed up in the pharmacy and in e-commerce: two products from the same brand could fail to look like the same brand.
That is not an aesthetic problem. It is a navigation problem. Anyone who has already bought a product from the range needs to find the next one without reading the whole box, and a shelf with no system forces you to read everything, every time.
Architecture before artwork
The range was given two families with deliberately opposite logics. The Alpha family, the complete multivitamins, is black across every SKU: what changes from one to the next is the audience, and the name of the audience is the only thing that comes in colour. The Bio family, the isolated nutrients, works the other way around: the colour belongs to the nutrient, not to the audience. Calcium blue, vitamin D yellow, B12 burgundy.
The rule behind both is the same: colour is a navigation code, not decoration. In the pharmacy, where the shopper is looking for a specific nutrient, the colour arrives before the name.
The children's supplement is the SKU that tests the rule, because it is the only point in the range where illustration and full colour are justified: the child has to recognise it and the parent has to trust it. The solution was to let the party happen inside the black Alpha frame, not in place of it. A system that cannot hold its own exception is not a system.
Then came the regulation
ANVISA (Brazil's health regulator) set a date in 2023 for every brand to comply with the regulatory framework for food supplements. In practice that means redoing the regulated panel product by product, with the nutrition table in the format the rule determines, the allergen in capitals because the rule demands prominence, and everything checked at the real size of the carton, not on screen at 200%.
I treated that panel as information design, not as leftover area. Every decision came out of the text of the regulation, not out of taste. There were more than 150 SKUs under my responsibility, inside a portfolio of more than 400, in a team of three people.
Regulation is not the enemy of packaging design. It is the proof that there is a system underneath, or that there never was one.
The rule that turns 150 projects into one
What makes 150 SKUs possible in a team of three is not speed. It is writing down, before opening the first file, what is fixed on every panel, what varies per SKU and where the variation is allowed to enter.
With that rule on paper, each product becomes a version of the same file rather than a new file. Without it, each product becomes a project, and 150 projects fit into no deadline. Reading the regulatory text and translating it into a file system is the part of the work nobody sees and the part that decides the whole result.
The same logic applies to whatever changes on its own over time. SKU codes, commercial names of components and lists of available colours should not live in the printed artwork: the company changes a component, discontinues a colour, and the entire pack goes out of date in the warehouse. Those variable data go on the label, which can be reprinted in a day. The artwork keeps what lasts.
Why this matters in Europe right now
The PPWR, the European packaging regulation, brings harmonised separate-collection labelling to every pack placed on the European Union market. Translated into the language of whoever designs: a new mandatory tenant, on a panel that is already crowded, across an entire portfolio, with a date on the calendar.
A brand with a written system will version. A brand without one will reopen artwork, one file at a time, paying twice: in the rework and in the time the competition spent on something else.