Rebranding Alaskan Kelp-Based Foods With Scalable Packaging
Barnacle Foods is a Juneau, Alaska company turning wild-harvested kelp into pantry staples — hot sauce, salsa, pickles, seasonings — for shelves across the country. We rebuilt the brand from a single hot-sauce label into a 16-product packaging system carried by a custom illustration vocabulary, designed the logomark that travels from a 4oz jar to a CPG retail endcap, and shipped a custom Shopify storefront that finally tells the kelp-farming story alongside the cart.
Live since 2023
A wild-harvested kelp brand with a story bigger than its label could carry.
Barnacle Foods makes pantry-shelf-ready foods from kelp wild-harvested off the Alaskan coast — hot sauce, salsa, pickles, seasonings, BBQ sauces — built around a sustainability story that’s genuinely uncommon in CPG. Founders Matt Kern and Lia Heifetz had been growing the line jar by jar since 2017, with strong word-of-mouth and a loyal D2C following from coastal Alaska through the Pacific Northwest.
The brand wasn’t scaling with the line. The original packaging was a patchwork of one-off labels designed for a 3-product startup, and the catalog had grown to 16 SKUs with national retail interest knocking. Each label fought every other label for visual real estate. The website was a transactional Shopify install that didn’t tell the kelp-farming story or explain why a buyer should pay a premium for sustainably wild-harvested ingredients. National grocery buyers couldn’t see the throughline that the founders could feel from inside the company.
The brief was a complete brand system that could carry Barnacle from regional grower into national CPG without losing the quirky, hand-touched personality that made customers fall for it. A scalable logomark. A unified packaging family across all 16 SKUs. A custom illustration system anchored in Alaskan landscapes and the signature ingredients themselves. And a custom Shopify storefront that gave the kelp-farming context the same first-class treatment as the cart.
A logomark that travels, a packaging family that scales, a storefront that earns the premium.
Logomark designed to travel from 4oz jar to retail endcap.
Started with the brandmark — an organically recognizable logomark that holds at every scale Barnacle needs to live at. Custom-drawn, not type-set. Anchored in the company's identity (the literal barnacle, the rocky coast, the hand-touched feel) without becoming a literal illustration. Tested at retail-shelf distance, on a 4oz jar, on a billboard, and as a 32-pixel app icon before it shipped.
Bullwhip Hot Sauce: the prototype that became the system.
The whole system traces back to one label. In 2019 we designed the Bullwhip Hot Sauce label — a salty sea-woman and a custom Bullwhip Kelp illustration — that the founders loved so much it became the brief for everything that followed. Each subsequent product earned its own custom illustration in the same visual vocabulary: a character, an Alaskan landscape moment, the signature ingredient. The line developed a brand narrative one label at a time.
A unified packaging system across 16 core products.
The challenge was a packaging family that read as one brand on a shelf without flattening the personality of each product. Built modular layout grids, a typography system that handled both the playful product names and the FDA-mandated nutrition panel, and a color system where each product gets its own palette but the family identity holds. Sixteen SKUs, one shelf presence.
Custom illustrations rooted in place and ingredient.
Every illustration in the system pulls from one of three buckets: a recurring character (the sea-woman, the kelp diver, the Alaskan trickster), an Alaskan landscape moment (the Inside Passage, a fishing dock at dawn, a kelp forest cross-section), or the signature ingredient itself rendered in detail. The result: a packaging line where every label tells a small piece of the bigger Barnacle story.
A custom Shopify storefront that earns the premium.
Built a custom Shopify Online Store 2.0 theme that gives the kelp-farming story and the sustainability context first-class IA — landing pages on kelp aquaculture, the company origin in Juneau, the harvesting partners, and the Alaska coastal economy. The cart isn't buried but it isn't the headline either. Buyers who land on the site arrive at the storefront having already understood why Barnacle costs what it costs.
Search visibility + national retail readiness.
The site was tuned to capture both branded D2C traffic ("barnacle hot sauce") and category exploration ("kelp salsa," "sustainable Alaska food"). Structured data, recipe schema, kelp-farming long-form content, and a streamlined product feed for retail-buyer outreach. The brand was ready when national grocery distributors came calling — sell sheets, line cards, and product photography all built in the same modular system.
The new brand identity is highly recognizable and sets Barnacle Foods up to scale with sustainability, exploration, and environmental consciousness at the forefront.
Lia Heifetz · Founder, Barnacle Foods
Numbers that matter for a CPG rebrand.
Brand, packaging, and storefront — in production.
The new brand identity is highly recognizable and sets Barnacle Foods up to scale with sustainability, exploration, and environmental consciousness at the forefront.
Like what you see? Let's talk about your commerce stack.
A 14-day strategic diagnostic — we audit your current stack, identify the friction worth fixing first, and ship a phased plan with sized investments. Fully credited toward an engagement if we move forward together.
What you walk away with
- ✓A measured map of every friction point in your current commerce flow
- ✓Three phased options — minimum, considered, comprehensive
- ✓Sized investments and timelines, no aspirational ranges
- ✓A clear "don't hire us if…" section. We mean it.
