Rumo makes trail food in Bergen for people who walk for days at a time. Its customers open a pouch at the end of a long day, often in the cold, sometimes in the dark and usually with gloves on. Every decision on this project came back to that moment.

The day first, then the meal

The front of each pouch carries one big number: the day of the route it belongs to. A colour tells you the meal, yellow for breakfast, tangerine for lunch and night blue for dinner. On day three you look for 03 in the right colour, and that is the whole decision.

A small icon sits beside each colour for anyone who can’t tell tangerine from yellow under a red head torch. Ingredients, cooking times and the recycling mark all moved to the back, which left room on the front for a number 70 mm tall.

One rule for the whole range

Once the pouches had day numbers, everything else Rumo sells followed the same rule:

• Energy bars in yellow wrappers, marked with their day.

• Drink sachets in a strip of one day’s worth, with a hole for a carabiner.

• A 16-day route box, packed in colour rows so a missing meal shows at a glance.

• A foil resupply sack with a tangerine label, for sending ahead to a mountain hut.

• A tangerine paper bag for people who buy a few pouches over the counter.

The range prints on recyclable film with one colour per meal, so a new recipe never needs a new ink.

Tested on a wet weekend

Before anything went to print, we packed a weekend of prototypes and ate them on a trail outside Bergen in October rain. Two things changed. The tear notch moved 10 mm lower, where a gloved thumb finds it, and the fill line inside the dinner pouch got thicker, because nobody measures boiling water carefully by torchlight.

Rumo’s head of product put the brief more simply than I had:

If you can’t read it with cold fingers at nine at night, it doesn’t go on the front.