Why Your Favorite Cult Food Brand’s Design Is Not an Accident
There's a jar of chili crisp sitting on shelves across America that costs $15 and sells out constantly. The brand is Fly by Jing. The product is good, but the product alone doesn't explain the obsession.
The label is high-gloss, the typography is confident, and the color palette (deep red, gold and black) borrows more from luxury fashion than food packaging. People buy the jar partly because of how it looks sitting on their counter, and that feeling is engineered from the logo down.
The same thing has happened across a wave of consumer brands over the last five years: Fishwife, Graza, Vacation sunscreen, Ghia, Brightland. Most of them entered categories dominated by established players with decades of shelf presence and none of them got there on product alone. They built visual identities strong enough to make the brand itself part of the draw.
What "Cult" Actually Means Visually
A cult brand is one people recruit for by buying it, telling you about it, and photographing it on purpose. That behavior happens when a brand has a clear visual point of view that signals something about the person buying it.
Graza's squeeze bottle is the clearest example. Olive oil has existed for centuries, and the category was dominated by dark bottles and illegible label copy designed to signal European prestige. Graza went the opposite direction: bright green, playful type, a squeeze bottle that says "let’s have fun making something delicious together." It turned a commodity into a personality, and every part of that was intentional.
The Shelf Is a Test You Can't Fake
Walk through any specialty grocery store and look at the shelves as a design problem. You have roughly two seconds of attention, a facing that's maybe four inches wide, and you're competing against 30 other options. At that scale and speed, good design means one thing: differentiation that reads instantly.
The brands that win share a few characteristics. They commit to a color they own completely, without hedging into neutrals out of fear of being too loud. They use typography with personality rather than a generic serif that signals "artisan" without meaning anything. And they design for how the product looks in someone's hand, on a shelf, and in a photo simultaneously. Those are three different contexts with different requirements, and the strongest CPG identities address all of them.
Fashion Has Been Doing This Forever
One of the clearest differences between the most interesting new food and beverage brands and legacy players is where they pull visual reference from. The incumbents reference each other while the newcomers reference fashion, editorial photography, and contemporary art.
Fishwife's packaging looks like it could be a print from a downtown gallery. Ghia's bottles could sit on the set of a French Vogue shoot. Vacation's campaign images borrow directly from the maximalist, flash-lit aesthetic of '90s fashion photography. These brands treat packaging as objects with cultural currency, which requires a designer thinking well outside the product category.
Why This Matters Beyond CPG
The lesson from brands like Fly by Jing, Graza and Fishwife applies well beyond food packaging. When a brand treats its visual identity as a strategic asset rather than something applied at the end of the process, the outcome changes.
Consumers are extraordinarily good at reading the signals embedded in design. They know the difference between a brand with a real point of view and one that assembled a mood board and called it a brand identity. Whether consciously or subconsciously, they register conviction (or the absence of it) in font choices, color decisions, and how packaging handles negative space.
The brands that earn cult status are the ones where design decisions serve a coherent brand identity. Getting on waitlists doesn’t come from having the best product, but from someone asking "what should this feel like?" before asking "what should this say?" Design done well creates desire; that's the actual job.
