Oscar & Gottfried Deli Meats

Over the past few decades, food companies have expanded their product lines to include healthy, organic, and artisan brands. We used this as inspiration for creating our own all-natural sub-brand of Oscar Mayer: Oscar & Gottfried, the heritage brand named after the two brothers who founded the Oscar and Gottfried Chicago butcher shop in 1883. The brand pays tribute to the freshness and quality of the original Oscar Mayer brand, providing customers with the best quality meat. Over this 48-Hour Repack, we created a package that provides maximum freshness, ease of use, minimal waste and maximum environmental sustainability.

Oscar and Gottfried is a high-quality brand that strives to minimize its impact on the environment. We rejected the idea that meat must come in plastic packages. During Oscar and Gottfried’s lifetime, fresh deli meats came fresh from the butcher and arrived home in butcher paper. Today, we go back to this original packaging: We sourced compostable, wax-coated butcher paper to create the bags and used compostable, wax-coated 60 lb. paper for the insert trays.

After interviewing mothers, grocery store patrons, and online researching, we found that the main gripes with deli meat packaging include packaging that was not easily resealable, soggy papers around the meat, and the consumption of rotting meat due to a misunderstanding of the elements that cause decay in deli meats. We created a more effective sealing mechanism by implementing a secure and easily usable slide-zipper design. This significantly improves the consumer’s ability to see whether the package is open or closed, whereas a press-and-seal zipper can deceive the eye.

To reduce “sogginess”, we created a wax-coated paper tray with a tab. This tray performs two functions: one function is to hold the meat, and the second function is to easily slide out so that the consumer can lift the slice from the tray without ripping or tearing the meat, ensuring a perfect piece every time.

Many consumers do not know the three main factors that cause deli meat to go bad are light, oxygen, and time. To provide the freshest deli meat possible, we redesigned the package to block out all light, implemented a securely locking zipper to minimize the meat’s exposure to oxygen, and created smaller package sizes to facilitate FDA recommended 2-3 day consumption period for opened deli meat.

We built the Oscar and Gottfried packaging to provide all-natural deli meats that could deliver on the original Oscar Mayer slogan that “there is always a better way.” We know that our new package will show and deliver on Oscar and Gottfried’s values of high quality products.