Búfalo Almeida Prado is a cheese brand that believes that their care for the buffaloes is reflected in the quality of their product.
Búfalo Almeida Prado is a cheese brand that believes that their love for buffalos is reflected in the quality of their product.
In a farm in Bocaina, state of São Paulo, cheese is produced with 100% buffalo milk.
Here it is believed that animal care translates into product quality. They produce a sophisticated food, which they believe lives up to Italian cheeses, and are nutritionally generous.
In addition to already selling to some of the best restaurants in São Paulo and being placed in several major markets, they needed to gain a larger market share. A new packaging became the answer - one that reflected all their product attributes and values.
The product was born of a mother's love. Their first buffaloes came from the doorstep of a neighbouring compadre in the 1980s. Maria Cecilia, mother of four, became interested in them for the higher nutritional value of the milk and, every morning, buffalo dairy came straight from milking to the family’s breakfast. As the number of buffaloes increased, more and more milk was left over and the first cheeses began to be produced.
From then on, things happened naturally. They began to create their own recipes, sell to more places and improve their technique. Maria Cecilia began traveling to Italy to understand the complexity of cheese production and began a long-term work with university professors to develop a more suitable genetic trait for their buffaloes, enabling milk to be supplied every month throughout the year.
Today, already with several partnerships built, they sell their cheese not only to São Paulo, but in various Brazilian states.
While growing, the buffaloes always have clean water, quality food, plenty of shade, and are treated with calm and respect. These are the foundations of their well-being, an ever-present concern on the farm. They are handled with classical music because they have found that this kind of music makes them calmer and more receptive during milking.
Before the buffaloes enter the milking parlor, they pass a pre-room, where they receive hydration with giant fans to lower the temperature further and vaporized water that leaves them even more relaxed. This concept was born from their most important and genuine attribute: the family's love for the buffaloes and how it reflects on the quality of the cheese they produce.
The cheese market is dominated by cow products. Goat or sheep cheeses are also already known to the public but, especially in Brazil, buffalo products are not as usual.
So the challenge was not only to translate our concept, but also to do so in order to create an empathy for the buffalo, bringing the weight of the company’s history and the quality of the product straight to the consumer's eyes.
The challenge was to achieve all of this in such a limited space, creating a quick and empathetic impact on the product. To secure our audience and to conquer new ones.
A different colour has been assigned to each product category. The most institutional colour, yellow, was attributed to the star product, the mozzarella. The rest were chosen within a balance between the colours of each cheese category and specific shades that set them apart from the others.
Two different but complementary typographies. Each one tells a part of the story.
"We can say that our buffaloes are happy. But what is being done to make them happy?"
It was important to create the opportunity to explain it by creating a concept that worked on each package differently, describing each one of the different ways that buffaloes are treated with love. This way we show how true and authentic our concept is.
As sweet as buffaloes may be, visually it is not a very empathetic animal. Using photographs could make it harder to display the animal in a more appealing way to our audience. With hand-made illustrations, reinforcing the important human part of the company, we can translate the personality we need into the buffalo. All other illustrations follow the same line for graphic coherence.