The Health Mix Was Already Great. Nobody Could Tell.
Here’s a problem we see more than we’d like.
A founder has spent years building something real. The product is good — not “good for what it is” good, actually good. The ingredients are honest. The recipe has roots. And then you walk into a store and see it sitting on a shelf between two competitors with slicker packaging, bolder colors, and a fraction of the nutritional integrity. And those products move faster.
That’s not a product problem. That’s a brand problem. And it’s exactly what brought Meynmai to us.
First, the Product
Meynmai is a traditional Indian health mix — 14 cereals, pulses, and nuts, blended together into a nutritious drink that Indian families have been making at home for generations. No sugar. No additives. Nothing artificial.
The name matters here. In Tamil, Meynmai (மெய்ந்மை) means truth. Not “natural.” Not “pure.” Truth. That’s not a tagline someone workshopped. That’s the word the founders chose because it meant something to them. The product lived up to it. The packaging didn’t.
What We Were Actually Solving
There’s a misconception that branding work starts with “what should the logo look like.”
It doesn’t. It starts earlier and goes deeper.
When Meynmai came to us, the real question wasn’t aesthetic. It was: who is this brand for, what do they already believe, and how do we design something that meets them where they are?
Health food buyers in India are a specific audience. They’re not buying on impulse. They read the back panel. They’ve been burned by wellness products that overpromised and underdelivered. They’re skeptical in exactly the right way. So “trustworthy” couldn’t just be a design direction. It had to be structural — baked into every decision, from color to typography to the way the illustrations were drawn.
The category also gave us a clear problem to push against. Most health food packaging falls into one of two traps: clinical white (clean, sterile, looks pharmaceutical) or fake-rustic (kraft paper, hand-drawn fonts, “artisanal” stamped on everything). Both are shorthand. Both have been done to death. Neither felt right for a brand whose name means truth.
Meynmai needed to feel warm without being nostalgic. Trustworthy without being cold. Rooted in food tradition without looking like a museum exhibit.
The Work
We don’t start with mood boards.
We start with questions — about what the product means to the people who make it, what it means to the people who eat it, and what it should never, under any circumstances, be mistaken for. The answers shape everything that comes after.
For Meynmai, those conversations kept returning to the same place: the ingredients themselves. Fourteen of them. Each one a real thing — a grain, a pulse, a nut — with texture and color and smell. The product wasn’t abstract. It was physical and honest.
So we built the identity around that.
The logo is set with a confidence that doesn’t need to shout. It’s the visual equivalent of someone who’s certain enough of what they’re offering that they don’t oversell it. Clean. Grounded. The kind of mark that holds up on a 30g sachet and a 1kg pouch without losing anything.
The color palette was never going to be green. Health food packaging has used green so aggressively that the color has basically stopped meaning anything in that context. We worked instead with the actual palette of the ingredients — the warm amber of roasted ragi, the deep tan of fried gram, the near-terracotta of certain pulses when they catch light. Colors pulled from the product, not imposed on it.
The packaging illustrations do the real work. Instead of photography (which flattens) or abstract pattern (which decorates), we used illustration to make the ingredients visible and specific. You can see what’s inside before you open the pack. That’s not a small thing for a brand built on transparency.
Put together, the packaging looks like exactly what it is. Which, for a brand called Truth, is the only acceptable outcome.
What Happened After
The Meynmai project was featured by the World Brand Design Society — a platform that covers brand identity and packaging work from studios around the world.
We don’t usually lead with awards. But this one matters because of what it signals. The World Brand Design Society isn’t looking for flashy. It’s looking for work where the thinking is sound and the execution follows through. Getting featured there means the Meynmai identity was strong enough to be recognized not just locally but in a genuinely global context.
For a food brand built on a traditional recipe, going up against the best packaging design in the world and being recognized — that’s not nothing.
One Thing This Project Keeps Reminding Us
We’ve worked with enough food brands to know: the story is almost always already there.
It’s in the name. In the recipe. In the reason someone started making this thing in the first place. Our job is not to invent a narrative. It’s to find the one that exists and make it impossible to miss.
Meynmai had everything. Fourteen ingredients. A Tamil word that means truth. A product that does what it says. We didn’t add anything. We just stopped hiding it.That’s what good branding is. Not decoration. Clarity.
Branzone Creative works with food, lifestyle, and consumer brands across India. If your product is better than your packaging suggests, we should talk.
See the full Meynmai project · Get in touch