The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2024–2025
Pueblo cured meats wear their curing rope as packaging — Pentawards 2025 Platinum
For Spanish cured meats, Simple Packaging Studio built the pack from the craft itself — kraft, adobe reds and the curing rope — and won Pentawards Platinum.
Pueblo · Simple Packaging Studio
What it had to solve
Cured meats are more than food in Spain — they are a symbol of Spanish history. Yet most packaging reaches for folk clichés. Barcelona's Simple Packaging Studio wanted Pueblo, a line of vacuum-packed artisan cold meats, to dignify village craft with what founder Gaizka Ruiz calls 'the complexity of simplicity'.
How it works
Cured meats are a symbol of Spanish history, but their packaging usually reaches for the same folk clichés. Simple Packaging Studio, a small Barcelona studio founded by Gaizka Ruiz after two decades in FMCG design, took the opposite route for Pueblo, a line of vacuum-packed artisan cold meats: strip the pack down until only the craft itself is left to speak.
The design rests on three pillars. Typography makes the strong name Pueblo the hero; a restrained palette of adobe red and sun-dried straw gold roots it in village architecture; raw kraft paper carries the unrefined, artisanal feel. The finishing element is the rope used in the drying and curing process — not decoration but the actual object that makes cured meat, tying the product to the hands that made it.
The gamble on restraint paid off. Pueblo won the Platinum Award in the Food category at Pentawards 2025, and the studio won Best Newcomer in its first year of entry. Pentawards' own profile described the pack as a bold tribute to village roots — authenticity, tradition and generations of craftsmanship — and design coverage added that it shows how thoughtful packaging can express cultural identity.
Why it lands
- The rope is not decoration: it is the object that makes cured meat, so the package tells the product's own story.
- Kraft paper and earth colours say artisan and village without a single folk cliché.
- Making the brand name the hero turned Pueblo into a quiet manifesto about origin and belonging.
- A first-time entrant beating global agencies proved narrative coherence can win over spectacle.
What it did
Pueblo took the Platinum Award in the Food category at Pentawards 2025, while the studio — entering for the first time — was named Best Newcomer of the Year. Design coverage of the win held the pack up as proof that honest, craft-based design can express cultural identity without spectacle.
What you can take
For a product steeped in tradition, do not decorate it with folklore: find the craft's own rituals and materials — the rope, the paper, the earth colours — and let them carry the message.
Since then
The Platinum made Pueblo the studio's calling card. In a Pentawards interview after the ceremony, Ruiz described the project as the purest expression of the studio's philosophy — 'the complexity of simplicity' — and evidence that a small studio can compete internationally on a coherent story rather than budget, echoing the advice that audiences find work rather than the reverse.
Sources
- Pueblo's packaging design by Simple Studio
- Interview with 2025 Best Newcomer and Food Platinum winner
- Pueblo Meat Packaging
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