I have been working on brands you can hold, and after years of screens it has been a genuine tonic.
There is beef, and there is wine, and there is the particular pleasure of designing something that will sit on a shelf and be picked up by a hand.
A package is an argument you have three seconds to make. There is no scrolling, no analytics, no chance to iterate next sprint. Somebody walks past, and either the thing reaches out and stops them or it does not, and mostly you never learn why. It is an honest kind of brief.
What I like about food and drink is that the product already has an opinion. A cut of beef raised properly, a bottle from a good vineyard, both come with a story that is true before I arrive. My job is not to invent romance. It is to get out of the way of the romance that already exists, so that a person holding it can feel the care that went in before they ever taste it.
That is harder than it sounds. The temptation with anything made by hand is to shout about it. Rustic type, kraft paper, a woodcut of a barn. That visual language of authenticity gets used so often that it can start to read as marketing, which is the opposite of what it hopes to say.
So the discipline is the same as always. Find the one true thing about this product, and say only that, in a way only this product could. The shelf is loud enough on its own. My part is just to be sure of the one thing, and let it be quiet.