The challenge

Tobacco is the biggest cause of preventable disease and death in the European Union, with over 700,000 deaths each year. The EU introduced a new directive stipulating the size, content and positioning of warnings on tobacco packs, but they needed to understand the implications for the industry and produce technical files for a successful rollout of the directive across Europe. We were entrusted with designing the warnings and creating a guideline document establishing the principles for how health warnings should appear on all packaging for smoked tobacco products throughout the European Union.

The solution

As part of a wider consortium, we conducted a Europe-wide audit of the tobacco industry, engaging with government officials, industry representatives, printers and manufacturers. Having gained a deep understanding of consumer rituals, production processes, substrates and the various packaging types available, we established the principles for how and where warnings should appear on roll-your-own tobacco products and designed the style for combined health warnings, whilst strictly adhering to the legislation in the new directive. Following ongoing consultation with the industry, we then produced an in-depth guideline document, for the implementation of the new style warnings, as well as sets of 168 technical files for each of the 28 EU Member States.