Renfro Foods

TricorBraun Gives Renfro Food’s Classic Southern Chow Chow Condiment a Brand New Look

Renfro Foods was founded in 1940 in Fort Worth, Texas as a packaged spices and pepper sauce business. It later expanded to include syrups, jellies, preserves, chow chow and other traditional Southern favorites. Today Renfro Foods is best known in its Southern market for its innovative line of award-winning Mrs. Renfro's products and for its annual use of pink closures on its most popular products to benefit breast cancer.

But before there was Mrs. Renfro’s, there was the Dixieland brand of chow chow, a “heritage” brand still popular with many of Renfro’s loyal customers. Now the more than 50-year-old product has a new look, with bright labels and a new closure designed by TricorBraun.

“We still sell each year 100,000 jars of this classic Southern relish, first made by my father in the late 1950s,” says Renfro Foods president Doug Renfro. “The recipe is basically unchanged and it is still popular, especially with older customers. But it was time for a new look, with simpler, more colorful labels and a more contemporary, color-coordinated closure. ”

Renfro worked with TricorBraun graphic designers—who have designed the Mrs. Renfro’s labels and closures—to tackle the redesign.

“TricorBraun recently created a bright, colorful ‘flame’ closure for our new ghost pepper salsa,” Renfro says, “and it was very successful with customers. That reminded me that custom printed closures are not much more expensive to produce than plain ones, and we decided to go ahead with this change that we have had in the plans for years.”

The new labels reference the original design with a similar color scheme (blue for the mild chow chow, red for the hot version). But the new design streamlines the copy and replaces the original yellow background color with white, giving the label a brighter, cleaner overall look.

TricorBraun designed a single decorated bright silver metal custom closure to serve both recipes. It echoes the red, white and blue colors of the labels in a design of concentric circles and replaces the original package’s custom white closure that carried the dated 1950s copy. Instead, the copy on the new closure celebrates the product’s more than half-century of Southern hospitality.

The new closure is manufactured by Silgan Closures, which also makes the Mrs. Renfro’s brand closures. Redstone prints the new pressure-sensitive labels.

TricorBraun Design & Engineering Group is a business unit of TricorBraun, one of North America’s leading providers of rigid, corrugated and flexible packaging. Our team’s primary mission is to design, engineer and manage the development, production and commercialization of custom packaging solutions for personal care, cosmetics, healthcare, food and beverage, industrial household chemical and animal health products. It is supported by TricorBraun’s more than 40 offices globally, holding one of the largest inventories of rigid packaging components worldwide.

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