Innovation on the outside – tradition on the inside. This was the result when Axfood had its proprietary AI solution design Garant’s 1.5 litre milk cartons, which will soon be delivered to stores around the country.
Innovation on the outside – tradition on the inside. This was the result when Axfood had its proprietary AI solution design Garant’s 1.5 litre milk cartons, which will soon be delivered to stores around the country.
Using a proprietary AI tool, Axfood designed an AI solution that can quickly create new packaging designs and support the creative process. The AI application is trained to understand the essence and values of Axfood’s brands, combine them with the features of the product and apply that in a packaging design.
“Our use of AI isn’t just about efficiency, processes and forecasting tools. It also unlocks creative potential. We’ve really done that in this case. The AI we developed has learned to understand what we and our brands stand for as well as the products themselves and our visual language. The integrated AI assistant we designed helps the application support our designers through prompting and the design process, providing inspiration and unique packaging designs that look completely different from everything else we’ve done,” says Björn Blomqvist, Head of AI Strategy at Axfood.
The results will soon be seen in the AI’s new design for Garant’s 1.5 litre long-life milk, with the same traditional Swedish milk on the inside and an anything but traditional design on the outside. Millions of customers will be able to find these AI-designed milk cartons on the dairy shelves at Axfood’s stores across the country.
“We wanted to research how we could use AI in our creative process, and we chose a traditional product to highlight the unexpected energy you get when the traditional meets the new. Milk is also a very visible product in our stores. We would have never come up with this design without AI, and by experimenting with it we’ve learned a lot about how and when we can use AI in the creative process,” says Lisa Dauchez, Head of Brand Development and Packaging at Axfood’s purchasing and logistics company Dagab.
The milk cartons were more than just an opportunity to find new ways to use AI internally. Their large volume and broad target group also meant that the backs of the cartons – also created by AI – were an excellent way to educate milk lovers of all ages about the importance of AI, highlighting how it is already used today, for example in the food industry.
“Even if we’ve been using AI for many years, with hundreds of AI models at the production level, we’re only at the beginning of a very exciting journey, not only in society and in the industry but also at Axfood. We’ve already created solutions for stores, warehouses and transportation that support our work in sustainability, assortment and sales campaigns and in streamlining our operations, all of which is hard to see from the outside – even though it’s ultimately important for the customer. It’s also fun that we could demonstrate AI’s capabilities this way: in the creative processes behind a physical product,” says Björn Blomqvist.
