Kraft Mac & Cheese gets a brand makeover designed to convey the power of comfort
America’s beloved boxed meal brand today unveiled a new look. The 84-year-old pantry staple swapped out its logo, signature noodle smile, colors and even its name for updated versions designed to better reflect the brand’s identity as a classic comfort food.
Kraft Mac & Cheese has a yummy new look / Kraft Heinz
More than a million boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese are sold each day, according to the company. Considering the widespread popularity of the boxed meal, the legacy brand, founded in 1940, figured it was time to brush up its brand image and identity – and position itself as a timeless comfort food for all people.
For one, the brand has changed its name from Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to the abbreviated Kraft Mac & Cheese, lending a more casual air. The brand is also getting a new, cheesy noodle smile, updated imagery and custom typography inspired by the iconic shape of Kraft macaroni noodles. The brand will ditch gradated tones of blue for a single, recognizable cobalt hue.
“Kraft Mac & Cheese is unquestionably an iconic comfort food, and now our new brand identity perfectly reflects that,” says Victoria Lee, a brand manager at the company. “We’ve embraced our colloquial name of ‘mac & cheese’ and added a drip to our iconic noodle smile to reflect our cheeky personality and our craveable, cheesy goodness.”
In fact, the new noodle smile is the centerpiece of the entire brand refresh; it’s the defining component of the logo and a design element that Lee says can “distinctively live wherever our brand inspires the positive power of comfort.”
The rebrand was developed and executed in partnership with creative agency Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR). The core concept behind the new brand identity, explains JKR’s group strategy director Hayley Burnham, is ‘Noodlefuls of Delight’ – a “strategic platform [that] inspired an identity system that felt positively trailblazing, contagiously energizing and deliciously real.” Ultimately, she says, the objective was to “evolve the brand to distinctively embody what positive comfort looks like.”
During a unique period of time marked by economic unrest and the losses of the pandemic, the brand recognizes the role that comfort plays in defining people’s everyday routines. The brand’s refresh felt timely precisely for this reason, suggested Lee in a statement. “We know that when things get tough, people aren’t turning to comfort food as a guilty pleasure; they are positively embracing comfort, saying ‘yes’ to feeling good, saying ‘yes’ to caring for themselves. There is a familiar, craveable, positive comfort to Kraft Mac & Cheese that makes it so special and iconic to millions of people across the world, and our new look is a reflection of what our brand means to our consumers.”
The rebrand will roll out across social and on Kraft Mac & Cheese’s website this summer. New packaging will hit grocery store shelves beginning in August.