Packaging reviews usually happen at a desk, with the pack in someone’s hand. That is the one place a shopper will never see it first. In a shop the pack is two metres away, surrounded by forty competitors, and it has about three seconds.
The set-up
I print the design at full size, wrap it around a real pack and put it on a shelf between the competitors. A borrowed shop shelf is best; a bookcase stocked with the real competitor products works too. Then I walk away, turn around and count.
What I check, in order
Four questions, and the order matters.
Can you find it in under three seconds?
Can you tell what it is without reading?
Can you read one thing, and is it the right thing?
Does it still look like the brand next to the loudest pack on the shelf?
If the answer to the first question is no, nothing else matters. The fix is usually less, not more: one bigger shape, one stronger colour, fewer words on the front.
Bring other people
I ask three people who have not seen the project to find the pack. I do not tell them what it looks like, only what it is: a filter coffee from a small roaster. The route their eyes take across the shelf tells me more than any review meeting.
Do it twice
I run the test once with the first draft and again with the final artwork. For Norrland the first round failed badly. In the second, with the mountain twice the size and the roast date moved to the top, people found the pack in just over a second.