Mac and Cheese

This is one of the earliest known recipes for macaroni and cheese. In the early 1800s, home cooks didn't worry so much about the exactitude of ingredients, so details are somewhat sketchy. You can't get any simpler than this.

INGREDIENTS:

* macaroni
* cheese
* butter

PREPARATION:
Boil as much macaroni as will fill your dish, until quite tender. Drain and sprinkle a little salt over it. Put a layer of macaroni in your baking dish, put on it slices of cheese, and on that a few bits of butter, then macaroni, cheese, and butter, until the dish is full, put on the top thin slices of cheese, bake in a 400° oven for 20 to 30 minutes.

The choice of color should be dictated by well-defined brand positioning objectives. When color is used inappropriately or doesn't support a brand's positioning, it can damage brand equity.

Kraft Foods, Northfield, IL, faced just such a problem in the 1980s. At that time, the Kraft logo was the brand manager's play toy. Any color was up for grabs and no consistent standards were in place. By the middle of the decade, Kraft no longer enjoyed instant brand recognition.

Indeed, in conducting proprietary research to evaluate the problem, the company learned that consumers had trouble finding sought-after Kraft products due to frequent package design changes. An example of this misuse of color centers on the company's flagship macaroni and cheese product, whose highly recognizable blue package has helped it to cement a place as one of America's best-selling food products.

In a major packaging misstep in the mid-1980s, the brand's frozen counterpart was introduced in an elegant brown box with skillfully crafted typography (see photo, p. 158). However, it resulted in lackluster sales. When the packaging color was altered to closely emulate the shelf-stable blue box, sales of the frozen product rose. In 1985, recognizing the problem of inconsistent use of colors across its product portfolio, Kraft made the decision to establish a uniform standard identity for its logotype, including a color system which remains intact nearly 15 years later. Here, color works hard. The red, white and blue logo may not be a fashion statement, but it permits Kraft brands to be quickly identified across multiple categories, in every retail point of distribution in the U.S.
From The Color Of Branding