Heinz Pasta Sauces Reveal Fresh Illustration Led Packaging by Marks

Marks, part of Propelis, has partnered with Heinz to deliver a vibrant new identity for the brand’s all-natural pasta sauce range, with refreshed packs rolling out across European shelves this month.

While Heinz is globally synonymous with tomato-based products, the shelf-stable pasta sauce category remains highly competitive, particularly around family mealtimes. Heinz tasked Marks with evolving its 11 SKUs to drive greater standout on shelf, strengthen taste appeal and better connect with time-pressed parents – all while preserving the integrity of the iconic Heinz brand.

The resulting design retains the unmistakable Heinz “keystone” label and mono font system, while introducing rich, full-colour depictions of finished pasta dishes to enhance appetite appeal and communicate culinary ease.

Across the large jars, positioned toward family mealtimes, vibrant, vintage cookbook-inspired illustrations of plated dishes – from Smooth Tomato Bolognese to Creamy Tomato & Cheese – convey warmth, simplicity and quality.

The medium jars retain a more artisanal, ingredient-led aesthetic, appealing to food-focused occasions. This tiered system improves shopper navigation while establishing a scalable framework for future range expansion.

A key challenge lay in differentiating multiple red-based sauces within a tightly defined label footprint. The final architecture balances plated dish visuals with carefully composed ingredient cues, ensuring clarity and distinction without disrupting brand consistency. Rather than adopting the food photography common across the category, Marks deliberately chose a hand-crafted illustrative approach to create a more distinctive and ownable presence on shelf.

Extensive creative exploration and consumer testing informed the final execution. Multiple routes were developed and refined to optimise colour differentiation, variant clarity and the prominent visibility of 100% natural ingredients and no artificial additives messaging.

James Milburn, Business Director and Heinz Project Lead at Marks, said: “Heinz is one of the most iconic brands in the world, which makes evolution far more challenging than reinvention. The opportunity wasn’t to change Heinz's promise of transparency and quality of ingredients – it was to sharpen its relevance within a highly competitive aisle.

“In a category dominated by photography and visual noise, we saw the opportunity to create something more distinctive and recognisably ownable. The new system brings warmth and immediacy to shelf while remaining unmistakably Heinz.

“It’s a confident step forward – subtle in structure, but meaningful in impact.”

The project follows the relaunch of Marks as a unified Brand Creation Platform within Propelis, bringing together Marks, Equator, and SGK Creative into one integrated global offering.

The platform connects more than 1,800 creators across 21 countries and 38 studios, providing clients with seamless access to strategy, creative, content, digital innovation, and production within a single tech-enabled ecosystem.