Project
Rumo
Packaging
Labels
Retail bags
2026
The brief
Rumo started in 2018 in a kitchen in Braga, freeze-drying stews for friends walking in Peneda-Gerês, and now sells 31 meals through its own shop and outdoor retailers in nine countries. Its packs had been designed like supermarket soup: a photo of the dish, a green leaf, the name in script. In a tent at night, with cold hands and a head torch, nobody could tell breakfast from dinner, and people on long routes ate their days out of order. The new packs had to stay light and print in two colours.
The idea
Number the days, not the dishes. Every pouch carries the day it belongs to, huge, and the time you eat it as one colour and one shape: breakfast in sun yellow with a sun, lunch in tangerine with a half sun, dinner in night blue with a moon. Hikers sort a box by number at home and eat down the count on the trail. The dish name sits small on the back, because by day nine nobody minds what it is called.
Meal pouches
Stand-up and flat pouches in three colours, printed in one ink each. The day number fills the front, and the pictogram sits in the corner where a thumb finds it in the dark. Hot water goes straight into the pouch.
Bars and sachets
Energy bars and drink sachets carry only the wordmark and the day. Sachets come joined in a strip with a hole at the top, so a day’s worth hangs off a pack strap on a carabiner.
Route boxes
White folding boxes for 4, 8 and 16 days, with the number of days printed huge on the side and the pouches packed inside in order. The box is also the shipping carton, so a resupply can be posted ahead to a mountain hut.
Resupply sack and shop bag
A foil sack that holds a whole box for a hut drop, and the tangerine bag from the Rumo shop in Braga.
What changed
The new packs reached the Braga shop in March 2026 and the outdoor retailers a month later. Customer service noticed first: the emails from hikers who had eaten the wrong day, which used to arrive every week of the season, all but stopped. Retailers who had kept Rumo in a basket by the till gave it a shelf.
Credits
Okapi: Tomás Reis (lead designer), Ana Pires (packaging), Beatriz Correia (type and marks)
Rumo: Hélder Faria (co-founder), Sónia Faria (operations)
With: pouches printed by flexography in Barcelos; product photography by Diogo Nunes, Braga
