In the wake of people’s growing awareness of UPFs (ultra-processed foods), food is going wild, redefining what “natural” means. After all, who doesn’t want bountiful and flamboyant fruits and vegetables from the garden? The importance of naturalness is demonstrated by the incessant use of green leaves and green colours as cultural shorthand for the idea of something unprocessed and derived from nature. But these hackneyed symbols and ubiquitous representations of nature became just another functional, generic claim, trying too hard to achieve the perfected, quasi-unreal, optimised representations. Brands have been using these polished visions of nature to emphasise the naturalness of their products, but true naturalness is wild, bold, unperfected, textured and real.

A growing number of brands and up-and-coming entrepreneurs are opening up new paths to signal products as unprocessed, wholesome, and unrefined – definitely broadening the visual vocabulary.

To do so, some brands go down the mystical path, like Cosmic Dealer, the chocolate treats brand – a garden full of wonders is transported into packaging, with butterflies, bees and mushrooms rubbing shoulders and the chocolates themselves that are not cookie-cutter shapes and instead have a more handmade aspect to them, all implying woodland-harvested and wild ingredients directly out of a cosmic fairy tale. 

That pathway of change from manufactured 2D designs trying to represent nature to more flowy and wild designs that convey naturalness in a more nonchalant and believable way, brings to mind the historical differences between French and English gardens and how nature was represented in both (c. the 18th century) – A French garden at the height of the court of the Sun King conveyed control over nature with its manicured topiaries and geometric hedges, all conveying a sense of pomp and formality and human dominance over green pastures. On the other side of the Channel – the English, inspired by Chinese gardens, concocted for themselves a more relaxed style of gardens that highlighted integration with nature, featuring sinuous and winding paths, overflowing foliage – all in all, cueing a sense of wildness, escape and allowing the audience to dream a little. And it seems brands are learning from this intentional laxness towards representations of nature.

And this isn’t only relevant to food brands – cosmetic brands are also jumping on the trend to showcase powerful but unprocessed natural ingredients, by reaching for less seen, and slightly strange facets of the natural world – like Herbar, the cosmetic brand where products are powered by fungi and adaptogens. Their visual worlds reveal an untamed, emotionally charged character, with accessories that mirror the natural world (e.g. their Gua-shroom, a facial massage tool shaped like a mushroom) or their dark amber bottles that cue powerful liquids from a supra-natural realm. It’s a deliberate step away from clinical minimalism that now feels generic, borrowing instead from folk medicine, apothecary styles and rituals. Their comms lean into this, pairing products with otherworldly-shaped mushrooms. Their underlying belief? That beauty can be healing – offering an imaginary release from constraining and strict beauty regimes, swapping it all out for something that breaks away from functionality into mood and whole-body health. As culture comes to understand that health is not an isolated principle but extends into moods, feelings, and emotions, these brands are framing efficacy as part of mood and identity.   

The wild qualities go beyond tokenistic design on the pack, into the actual product formulations. Ella’s Flats superfood seed crackers represent this well with their irregular, rough, and raw textures, where you can see the actual ingredients, such as seeds and nuts, directly and visibly in the product – cueing again that it’s beyond natural; it’s wild because it’s whole ingredients. The pack reinforces this with visuals of a vibrant, solar, radiating flower, whose petals spread a sense of warm, untamed optimism.


All in all, cues of wilderness count positively to wonder (e.g. the warm optimism of Ella’s Flats) – and in a category where naturalness is a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator, wonder may just be the solution in an overcrowded market.

3 Key Takeaways for Brands

  1. Move from perfected to untamed – Rough textures, irregular shapes, whimsical designs, the vocabulary of naturalness is moving away from optimised and towards alive.

  2. Make wildness systemic, not just aesthetic – could your product benefit from an extension of ‘wild’ into its formulation, texture, and new exciting ingredients harvested responsibly?

  3. Let efficacy be connected to moods, not just function, as consumers understand health holistically, framing products around feeling and identity (not only clinical claims).

Gabi Orsi, Project Director

Brands Gone Wild: The power of the new natural