Introduction to the Brand: Pacha de Cacao is a juice brand that brings something new to the soft drinks category – a drink that is not just delicious and highly nutritious – but what’s so refreshing is that it’s created from cacao pulp, a natural by-product from cacao production. Bright, colourful and inspired by the colours of the Ecuadorian rainforest, Pacha de Cacao is a brand full of positivity – created to give farmers not just fair trade, but a new additional source of income.

The brief: Entrepreneur Marika van Santvoort was in need of a solid doses of Positivity for her new start-up juice brand Pacha de Cacao. Derived from Pachamama -‘Mother Earth’ in Inca mythology – Pacha de Cacao is Marika’s personal tribute to Mother Earth.

Pacha de Cacao celebrates an ancient farmer tradition, using the fresh pulp from the cacao fruit as a new source of nutrition. In the flourishing chocolate industry, cacao farmers work extremely hard and get paid very little. That’s not right. Marika saw first-hand how farmers have always used the pulp as a fresh source of energy to keep them going during the day. The pulp looks like a white lychee-type of flesh around the cacao beans, and it normally goes to waste in cacao production because everyone is only after the beans, the main ingredient for chocolate. So rather than letting it go to waste in our mondial craving for chocolate, Pacha’s unique cacao juice gives back to the Amazon and its farmers, as an additional source of income and presents the world with a great new refreshing drink.

Marika approached Positivity Branding to bring her great idea to life, and create a brand initially for The Netherlands market. We were restricted only by the bottle shape – not unusual for a startup – and were given the task to create a design that can really tell the complex story of the connection between the farmers, the rainforest, and the refreshing drink.

Our design is a salute to the beauty of the Amazon jungle, home to the cacao trees that bear the precious cacao fruit. The simple illustrations, created in-house, are at the heart of the design. They tell the story around the label of the interconnected nature of the rainforest, the farmers, the cacao fruit and the juice, using bright Ecuadorian colours. This gives Pacha de Cacao a true taste of the Amazon, just like the delicious juice.

We also created the visual identity around the packaging, bringing the rainforest to life by creating a paper-cut jungle surrounding the juice bottle in the same style as the illustrations.