Bowery Salad Kits—a premium meal made with smart produce.

Vertical farming innovators Bowery Farming, who grow produce in resource-responsible, technology-aided indoor farms, tapped Nessen Co to design their new line of salad meal kits. In a category whose primary talking points are convenience, Bowery’s Salad Kits promise a delicious, premium meal with exceptional greens and quality ingredients. To bring this idea to life, the understated design ignores category norms and instead takes inspiration from cafe and restaurant design. The dressings and ingredients of the product line’s three salads are presented in carefully painted illustrations with a bold, memorable lettuce leaf as the pack’s focal point.

“The category cues for the salad kits that are available in grocery stores right now are well established and basically unappealing. They tend to feature a lot of lists, claims, and stock photos, and primarily draw attention to how convenient the kits are. Because this is such a high-quality meal, we wanted the design to frame it in the way a restaurant might: understated, not too salesy, and with lots of craft details that took time to create like painted illustrations.”

The salad kits’ initial launch will see them stocked at both major retailers such as Giant and independent grocers like Eataly.

Dedicated to protecting the environment all year long, Bowery Farming’s indoor, vertical farms are 100 times more productive than a traditional farm of the same size, save millions of gallons of water over traditional irrigation, and eliminates the application of harmful pesticides. Because these farms are located right outside of urban centers, not only do they provide fresher produce with a smaller carbon footprint, but all the land that would otherwise become farmland is allowed to remain wild.