Metro & Food Basics Summer Tote Series

For their Summer 2023 activation series, Metro and Food Basics wanted to bring fun and delicious groceries to their consumers. As part of this initiative, the question came for what was could these products be shared with the consumer in a way that felt engaging, personal, and would be an item that one might want to be reused.

Born out of this question was an illustrative series of ingredients and products unique to the events the team visited, printed on soft canvas bags that felt more organic than the expected, and often synthetic, grocery bag.

The first step of the process involved sorting subject matter. The key venues that these bags would be distributed was food festivals, so the natural train of thought led to what the attendees would have in common with both chains: a love of food, and a care for the ingredients that go into each dish.

Then began the matching of food items to each event, sorting which subject matter could be made broader to cover multiple events, or be more evergreen to carry over into events that may not have as much of a food focus.

Events like the Lebanese Festival and their food vendor section very naturally led to depicting ingredients such as parsley, garlic, sesame seeds, and chickpeas, while the Ottawa Dragonboat Festival took a cheekier approach with a dragonfruit.

Once designed, teams of brand ambassadors visited festivals and took to the streets for guerrilla sampling. The bags were a huge hit with the consumers, often commenting on the ingredient designs and delighting in the products inside that matched each event and bag. In the end we were left with happy customers, happy clients, and of course, some very delicious food.