Retail brand creation
& development in Munich

Turn over an own-brand product in a German supermarket. Near the bottom of the back panel sits a short line: hergestellt fuer, then a company name and an address. Sometimes it says vertrieben durch or manufactured for. That line comes from EU law. It shapes several design decisions.

The rule comes from the EU regulation on food information to consumers, Regulation 1169/2011, known in German as the LMIV. It requires the label of prepackaged food to name the food business operator responsible for the information, with a name and an address. The responsible operator is the business under whose name the food is marketed. For an own brand, that is normally the retailer. The factory need not appear.

This is why producers can stay anonymous. A dairy filling yogurt for three competing chains need not appear on any of their packs. The chain names itself in the responsibility line. The producer stays out of sight. For many suppliers that anonymity is what makes the deal acceptable, since it protects their own branded range.

The design question is how visible the line should be. Legally it must be legible. Commercially it is where curious shoppers look to learn who really made the product. Some retailers keep it plain, in the ingredient type. Others add a customer service address as a sign of trust.

There is a limit to the anonymity. Products of animal origin, such as cheese, meat and fish, carry an oval identification mark with an approval code for the processing plant. That code belongs to separate EU hygiene rules, and anyone who looks it up can find the plant. It cannot be hidden. Place it deliberately.

The address is the second limit. It must be a postal address. A website alone does not satisfy the rule. Retailers with several legal entities should state in the brief exactly which company and address go on the pack, because the front brand and the legal name often differ.

Changes in supplier add one more task. If the retailer moves a product to another producer, the responsibility line stays the same. That is a practical benefit of the model. The plant code on animal products will change, though. The artwork needs a controlled update, never a quick edit on press.

For goods made outside the EU, the line names the EU importer. Settle this in the brief before artwork starts. Nobody wants to redraw a back panel after legal review.

An own-brand range needs names at several levels, and teams often solve only the top one. The umbrella brand gets a workshop. The hundred products under it get whatever the buyer typed into the listing form.

That is where the shopper actually meets the range. Nobody searches the shelf for an umbrella brand. They look for tomato soup, oat biscuits or a mild shampoo for daily use. The product name is the part of the pack they read.

The first decision is the naming style. Most own-brand ranges use descriptive names: plain words that say what the product is, sometimes with one quality word such as rich, classic or light. This keeps the range easy to shop and cheap to extend. A second style gives each product or sub-line an invented name. It creates character but costs more to support, and the invented names rarely stick unless the retailer spends money behind them.

Whichever style is chosen, the vocabulary has to be fixed. If one product is called light, another reduced and a third lower fat, shoppers have to guess whether those words mean the same thing. A short glossary of approved descriptors, with one meaning each, prevents that drift.

Word order matters as well. A consistent pattern, such as product type first, then variety, then descriptor, lets shoppers compare packs quickly and makes the online listings sort sensibly.

Sub-lines need their own rules. A premium line, an organic line and a free-from line inside the same own brand each need a naming convention that signals the tier without repeating the tier name in every product name. Usually the sub-line mark carries the signal and the product name stays descriptive.

Length is a physical limit. Product names have to fit on narrow packs, shelf labels, till receipts and app screens. Many retail systems cut names after a set number of characters. A name that reads well on the front panel can become nonsense on a receipt, so the naming work should include a short version for each system.

Finally, names need checking before print. A descriptive name is harder to protect as a trademark, but it can still collide with a registered name held by a competitor. A quick search for each new product name is cheaper than a relabel after launch.