Butcher Thick Cut Bacon is Oscar Mayer’s most premium product. Hearty, smoky, meaty goodness expertly cleaved into succulent slices, it’s the stuff dreams are made of. But in reality, consumers weren’t buying it—mainly because they couldn’t see it.

Lost in a sea of yellow, red and black, this king of cuts was anything but dominant at shelf. Even when consumers did stumble upon it, they couldn’t tell what made Butcher Cut Bacon so special. To them, it just looked like more of the same with a higher price tag.

What Butcher Thick Cut needed was a big bold look to go along with its big bold flavor and premium price.

After a thorough visual audit of the category, we noticed something interesting about bacon packaging. Most of the real estate isn’t on the front of pack. It’s on the back. Which happens to be the side that faces down at shelf.

So we flipped our bacon over. Using the back panel as the front, we effectively tripled the amount of space we had to work with—while instantly differentiating Butcher Thick Cut from every other bacon on the shelf. Then we turned up the heat and brought in the real, with an authentic, butcher-style paper substrate and precision-crafted type so traditional, it feels new all over again.

So far, results have been epic, with sales of Butcher Thick Cut Bacon increasing significantly since the new packaging hit shelves in August 2013. Moreover, our design is being used internally by Oscar Mayer as a means of inspiring and driving better design across their entire product portfolio.

“Like nothing the category has ever seen…”

--- Julie Schaubroeck, Senior Marketing Director, Oscar Mayer