The biggest print quality experiment ever?
And nothing happened???

Do you remember my article from last fall about the redesign of the Oreo logo, which featured a 10+ dE00 difference between the old and new versions? Both being used jointly on the shelves? Ah! The horror!!! What were they thinking??? Now, over half a year later, let’s take a look at what happened during this large-scale brand color reproduction case study. Did the sales plummet, did consumers lose confidence, as color experts claim should happen with this kind of difference in brand color?

CONTENTS: Nothing??? | Sales figures | Articles discussing the redesign | Didn’t they notice? Didn’t they care? | Why is this important? | PS | Updates 

In case you are in a hurry, let’s jump to the conclusion right away: even though there was a 10+ dE00 difference and both the old and new logos were used in shops jointly, and next to each other on the shelves, there were no significant changes in sales reported. There are no widespread complaints or outrages to be found in discussion forums or other online outlets. There were only a handful of articles published that discussed the redesign. Even several websites where you can download logos didn’t notice the change: they still show old ones… And during that quarter, Oreo didn’t notice a decline in sales, quite the opposite: there was even a gain in market share in the USA, according to the quarterly results presentation. Of course, sales and market share are influenced by many factors.

So, despite a color difference that – according to the ‘common wisdom’ in the print bubble – should have ruined sales and brand perception in general, it seems nothing significant happened… No decline in sales, no public complaints or outrage were reported. Which contradicts – and busts – that ‘common wisdom’, which is spread by people selling color-related tools and services. And I can assure you, I tried hard to find anything related to the logo redesign, including the help of Google Gemini.

To ‘feel the temperature’ about this 10+ dE00 difference, I asked Google Gemini how consumers responded, this was the answer: “No Widespread “Complaints” or “Outrage”: Unlike some controversial logo changes (e.g., Gap’s brief 2010 redesign or Tropicana’s short-lived 2009 packaging change), there hasn’t been a significant groundswell of negative comments or complaints from the general public about the Oreo logo.”

This real-world, large-scale case study is very close to the ultimate test. And there is no evidence to be found that sustains the myth that small color deviations will ruin sales. This kind of case study surpasses surveys, lab tests, and focus groups. This is the real deal: it showed where people put their money. And that was on the cookies they loved, before, during, and after the redesign. It’s the product quality that sells, as shown in previous studies, such as this one.  There are cases where print quality can endanger sales, like in the case of this package, where bad print quality seems to indicate that some chemical leaked onto the package.

I know, the absence of proof is not the proof of absence. But there is no evidence suggesting that in that specific time frame, there was a significant (negative) change in sales or public brand image.

As a side note: surveys, lab tests, and focus groups can easily be influenced or ‘framed’ and steered in the direction to confirm one’s beliefs. So, always check how they were conducted and what the questions were!

BTW: this should not be interpreted as a justification to produce bad print quality, but it does reject the need for tiny tolerances for this kind of print that are pushed onto printers, the kind of tolerances hat are making the lives of printers miserable, costing them money and eating their already very low profit margin (around 2% someone recently claimed on LinkedIn). Let’s stick to the tolerances specified in the applicable ISO standards; these are decent and within reach. Best practices like FOGRA PSO/PSD and Idealliance G7 are instrumental to achieve these, and highly recommended.

Sales figures
Mondelez, the owner of Oreo, is a public company. Which means they publish results every quarter. But they don’t publish individual results for Oreo, it’s part of the ‘Biscuits & Baked Snacks’ division. With that in mind, plus the fact that sales in cookies might have a slight seasonal variation, let’s take a look at all quarters in 2023, 2024, and the first one in 2025 (in millions US$).

What does this graph tell us? Overall, only minor changes. Please note that the redesign was completed in Q3 2024. A quarter that showed an increase in turnover, both compared to Q2 2024 and Q3 2023… So, in the quarter, both the old and new logos, with a 10+ dE00 difference in brand color, were used next to each other on the shelves, and the turnover increased… Interesting, isn’t it… No significant decline in sales, but a moderate increase…

Yes, I hear you: this is the total of ALL biscuits and baked snacks! We shouldn’t draw conclusions from that global category about one of the underlying products. And yes, you are right. But…

Next to the – boring – financial figures, these publications are always supported with a nice presentation. And guess what that presentation mentioned in the results of Q3 2024… The evolution of the market share of Oreo… It explicitly stated that in the US, Oreo had gained market share… And in Europe, there was an overall ‘solid category value growth’. Doesn’t sound like ruined sales…

And to give you an idea about the size, the impact of real brand redesign disasters, here are a few:

• Tropicana (2009): sales dropped by about 20%, resulting in a 30 million US$ loss in just one month (more info)
• Tropicana (2024): sales dropped by nearly 20% (more info)
• GAP (2010): the redesign was reverted after only six days (more info)
• Weight Watchers (WW) (2018/2019): the rebranding from Weight Watchers to ‘WW’ (Wellness that Works) resulted in a loss of 600.000 members in the first half of the year and shares in WW dived 35%… (more info)

But I didn’t find anything similar on the 10+ dE00 Oreo logo redesign… People kept enjoying Oreo cookies. Because that’s what matters: the cookies. The packages are only there to protect the product and make it easy to find them in the chaos on the shelves.

Articles discussing the redesign
I also asked Google Gemini to provide me with a comprehensive list of all the articles related to this redesign. He came up with four articles… And mine is at the top of the list.

• “The biggest print quality experiment ever? Brand Colors IRL: the Oreo case“ by Eddy Hagen (Insights4Print.ceo, October 19, 2024): This article discusses the real-world implications of the new Oreo logo and brand color on packaging, noting the different versions appearing in supermarkets and questioning the impact of color differences on sales. 
• “Oreo Logo: The Complete Story Behind The Sweet Success“ (Turbologo, April 11, 2025): This article provides a comprehensive overview of the Oreo logo’s evolution, specifically mentioning the 2024 redesign as a transformation into a “digital art object” with a “bold azure-blue outline” and “neon glow.”
• “The History and Evolution of the Oreo Logo“ (Famous Company Logos, October 16, 2024): This piece also details the history of the Oreo logo and notes “slight refinements” made in the “2024 – Present” iteration, where the metallic blue outline is “aligned more to the thick white letters with a dark blue background.”
• “Cocoa for more wow – OREO now with an adapted recipe“ (Yumda, October 10, 2024): This article mentions that Oreo not only has a new taste but also a “new look: in bright blue with a dynamic image of the cookie on the packaging, the brand ensures greater visibility at the POS.” This suggests the packaging update is tied to the logo and brand aesthetic.

So it seems that the redesign went largely unnoticed…

Didn’t they notice? Didn’t they care?
You might have a hard time believing people didn’t notice this color difference, but it’s not that abnormal. Here’s a list of reasons why most people don’t see these kinds of color differences:

• It’s a special skill: only about 16% of the population has a ‘Superior (Good) Score’ on the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue test, 68% ‘Average (Normal)’, and 16% ‘Low (Weak)’. And these numbers are from tests under ideal viewing conditions, a shopping environment can be very different (see below).
• Experienced vs not: and that special skill set can be trained, which was also shown in this study and this study. People in the printing industry, whose job it is to judge color every single day, will become better over time, significantly outperforming ordinary people. By the way, can you recall the first time you had to check the color quality of a print job? For the record, after a certain age, our color vision tends to deteriorate. But – fortunately – that seems to start only from age 70. 
• Our color memory is poor, very poor: even in a close comparison, with colors a bit apart, our color memory is already twisted: it shifts to the center of a color category. And the most iconic color, Coca-Cola red? Participants in a test with 6 versions of red, all famous brand colors, didn’t agree on which one was the right one. The most popular one wasn’t the correct one. 
  
• A supermarket is very different from a press console:
  • Lower light level: At a press console, there is a lot of light (the P1 condition for ‘critical comparison’ from ISO 3664:2009 – VIEWING CONDITIONS). Why? Because that makes it easier to detect small color differences. The kind of color differences that you would not be able to detect in a lower amount of light, like in a shop.
  • Not flat: At a press console, the sheets lay flat. The third dimension is missing. However, in real life, outside the print bubble, that third dimension will play a crucial role: it will influence lighting and, consequently, color perception. That might make it more difficult to spot color differences, but might also make you ‘see’ color differences where there are none… as I showed in this article. 
    
  • Samples are not stacked on top of each other: When doing a color-critical print job, often a reference is placed on top of the new press sheets. But that’s not real life: on the shelves, there will be a space between packages, plus a shadow. Which will make it more difficult to spot color differences. It is only in very specific print segments that the final print will be put within a very close distance to another part: wall and floor coverings. And you will look at these for years, instead of a very short time for FMCG packages. That’s why, for this kind of specialized print, tiny tolerances do matter. But not for general packaging.

    

  • Cluttered background: When conducting a print color evaluation, the applicable ISO standard, which I previously mentioned, also stipulates that all objects that influence color perception should be removed. That’s why the press console is neutral grey, to avoid influences. But that’s not the case in a shop: you have all these different, vibrant colors screaming for attention.
    
  • Very different timeframe: And this might be the most prominent difference, the time you take to do a color judgement in a print shop versus the time you take to look at an individual package during shopping. Tests with eye-tracking in a shop-like environment have shown that the ‘Total Fixation Duration’ is usually less than 1 second, with Coca-Cola cans only one-tenth of a second. Try judging color in that time frame! It’s a different part of the brain that is activated at that time. 
    
  • How our brain processes input: Related to the short timeframe, our brain consumes a lot of energy, which is why it evolved to be as efficient as possible. The result of that is what is called ‘predictive processing’. When we are looking for something, like a pack of Oreos in a shop, our brain will stop processing visual input as soon as it receives enough information to ‘recognize’ that package of Oreos. It doesn’t need all the visual details, just enough to recognize it. And here is a fun test on LinkedIn, by Fernando Arendar. I’m sure you will recognize those products immediately, but can you also spot what’s wrong? With some, I had a tough time, but once you see it, it’s so obvious that you wonder how you could have missed it. Predictive processing, that’s why. Another aspect of how our brain processes all that sensory input is ‘selective attention’ and ‘change blindness’. Our brain will only process a part of the input, only the information we need at that time (Where are the Oreo’s?) There have been quite funny tests to show selective attention, tests where the participants didn’t notice the – quite obvious if you know – elephant in the room. Check out the video in this article and see for yourself!
  • Framing: when entering a print shop or a press room, the ‘critical color part’ of your brain is being activated, because you need it there. However, that’s not the case when shopping; your brain is in a different mode: completing your shopping list, finding the best cookies, and securing the best deal on washing powder. And this can make something that is obvious in a print job, will be much less obvious in another situation Check out the little test I described in this article. It was only at the moment I pointed my girlfriend to the color of the packages that she noticed the – for me rather obvious – difference. Not when I asked a more neutral question. And that’s, BTW, what can go wrong in surveys and focus groups: if you tell the participants what you are researching, you are already framing them. Influencing their answers. That also explains why almost 1 out of 3 print professionals claimed to see a color difference between two identical samples in this test: they were asked if they noticed a difference (framing the test), and being a print professional, they had to notice a difference. 

    

And last but not least: seeing a color difference is in essence a neutral fact. It does not necessarily mean that a visible color difference is considered ‘disturbing’ or ‘bad’, or that it would influence buying behavior. These are three distinct categories: neutral, emotional, and consequential. This study shows the difference.  

 By the way, there are two reasons why people might betray their favorite brand: promotions by another brand or their favorite brand being out of stock. ‘Looking differently’, which could be a color difference, isn’t a reason (first graph below). Not even for the participants of the FOGRA Colour Management Café, on brand colors, where I also asked this question (second graph). 

You might not be familiar with some of the concepts I mentioned above, but they are real. They come from a research field called ‘behavioral economics’, which studies human behavior. And, as it turns out, humans are abolutely not the rational beings we consider ourselves… ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow‘ by the late Daniel Kahneman, is a book I can recommend, it was a real eye-opener for me. And it reads like a thriller…

Why is this important?
I have been questioning the demand for ever-lower print tolerances for brand colors for years. With all kinds of tests, like e.g. the test where people had to pick the ‘right’ Coca-Cola red from a series of six, I showed that we can’t remember brand colors correctly, not even the iconic Coca-Cola red. Which is also supported by scientific studies, and that consumers are quite tolerant towards deviations in brand color reproduction. After a long search, I found the origins of the often-used claim that color increases brand recognition by up to 80% (spoiler alert: it is based on studies in the newspaper industry, which demonstrate the benefit of color advertising over black and white ads). And I also found other studies, like this one, emphasizing the importance of ‘color’ in packaging, but these were always on color categories, not on tiny deviations (like 2 dE00) in print. Even after challenging people to show me a study that shows that tiny deviations matter to consumers, nobody could provide such a study.

But this time, I witnessed a real-life, worldwide case study. It’s hard to get any closer to the truth than with this one. And the conclusion? Well, it seems nothing significant happened… I couldn’t find any decrease in sales (the Oreo market share in the USA even improved); Google Gemini couldn’t find any public outrage. The number of articles on the new logo is minimal, as if most people hadn’t even noticed.

Even with this large-scale case study, I couldn’t find any evidence supporting the claim that minor deviations would ruin sales. And I did invest a lot of time in finding relevant information. So, let’s end the 2 dE00 madness, it’s hurting printers.

P.S.: As I have said many times before, this is not a justification for poor print quality; we should adhere to the tolerances set in the applicable ISO standards. And best practices and tools to improve consistency are undoubtedly worth a look, to minimize set up waste, e.g. But these tools should not be ‘abused’ to demand ever tighter tolerances in print, to justify a race to zero dE000. Which is an evolution that has led to more waste, with perfectly usable print jobs being rejected… This tiny tolerances and rejected jobs will eat into the already tiny margins of print shops. And that’s why I do what I do: protecting printing companies from – untill proven differently – unfounded claims that are hurting them.

UPDATE 01/06/2025: Here’s part of a comment on LinkedIn, by someone who is involved with colors in her professional life: “We prefer Trader Joe’s ‘Jo Jo’s. Only a great sale would make us buy OO regardless of packaging.” Only a great sale would make her betray her favorite brand… Which confirms one of the points above.

UPDATE 07/06/2025: When I went shopping yesterday, I noticed something interesting: a variety of Oreo in a bag with the old logo, put into a display secondary packaging (so: a dedicated one!) with the new logo… So, here we have a brand owner mixing primary packaging that has the old logo with a secondary packaging that has the new logo… And when I measured examples in my previous post, both are 10+ dE00 apart…

UPDATE 21/06/2025: McKinsey has recently published an interesting study. It’s on sustainable packaging, but it also contains more general information, e.g., which factors influence buying decissions, how important ‘appearance’ of packaging is. Here are two of the graphs from that study.

Related posts:

The biggest print quality experiment ever?
Brand Colors IRL: the Oreo case Brand colors in real life: the Milka case And no one called it a brand’s worst nightmare…
(11 dE00 between adjacent packages)