I really hate it when companies do this

This crap needs to stop.

Although I'm talking about a very specific product here, Herdez Guacamole Salsa, I've seen this happen a bunch of times in the grocery store across different products.

What you're seeing in the above photo is the exact same product by the same company with two labels so different from each other that you'd be confused if you're buying the right thing or not.

Can you guess which is the newer logo? I didn't think so. It's the one on the left. The company who makes this decided to make "Medium" more difficult to read, opting to go with a capitalized pseudo-handwritten thing instead of uppercase that has the characters separated. The new logo is bad design, but let's leave that aside for a moment.

The more you look at these two jars, the more you see the differences, both for the top and bottom labels. And again, remember, same product, same company.

What's the problem? The company who makes this, MegaMex Foods LLC, decided to refresh the logo for one of their products but yet have both of these on the shelf at the same time during the transition from the old to the new logo.

Why is this a big deal? When you're shopping for stuff at the grocery store, CONSISTENCY MATTERS. The last thing you need to be is CONFUSED by having two of the same thing on the shelf looking different.

I legitimately got annoyed by this almost to the point of anger because I had to stop and take time out of my life to look at these jars just to make sure I was buying the right thing.

What the company who makes this should have done:

PULL ALL OLD STOCK FIRST.

All it would have taken is a phone call or email to the managers of the stores this gets delivered to with the instruction of, "Hey, could you pull all the old jars off this? We just released this with a new label and don't want to confuse people."

Other products do get replaced this way when a new logo design is introduced. But not this one. MegaMex decided to have the existing jars with the old logos to just stay where they are and run out the stock. Bad call. And no, the old-logo product wasn't expired or anything like that; I checked. My point is that with both these logo designs present literally right next to each other causes consumer confusion. Again, it was a bad call.

Is this a "first world problem"?

No.

Regardless of what it is you buy at the grocery store and regardless of item price, the absolute last thing you want is to be confused as to what you're buying. Doesn't matter what it is. Could be a loaf of bread, a can of peas, bag of chips, whatever.

Whenever you see a logo change, your brain automatically says, "WHOA whoa whoa... what's this? Is this the same thing as before? Did they change it? What's going on? Should I even buy this?"

Yeah, a logo change can actually cost sales; it's that important.

Note to MegaMex Foods: The next time you change a logo, pull the old stock first.

Published 2023 Nov 16