Biscuit brand illustration design that turns factory targets into a waka, a cookie jar, a rollercoaster and a rugby match the whole site can get behind
Griffin’s is New Zealand’s biscuit maker, the company behind Cookie Bear, Toffee Pops, Gingernuts, MallowPuffs and Squiggles, plus a snack cupboard that runs from Eta to Kettle. Its factories in Pukekohe and Wiri run on big annual targets: zero accidents, better plan compliance, less waste, lower cost per unit, and total employee involvement from the floor up.
Targets on a noticeboard are easy to walk past. Griffin’s wanted its people to see the goals every day and feel part of them: large-scale illustrations for the factory walls that carried the numbers inside a story and felt like Griffin’s, not a corporate dashboard.
Total employee involvement started with the artwork itself. At both factories White Rabbit ran a full-day workshop on site, with the staff coming through in teams for a few minutes at a time. Each group talked through their ideas, sketched them down themselves or built them from the scrapbook craft materials on the table, and our illustrator sat alongside drawing quick live versions of what they described. By the end of the day we had a wall of ideas from the people who work the lines, and we refined the strongest into four finished scenes.
Pukekohe got two. A crew of Griffin’s biscuit characters paddles a carved waka together, Cookie Bear up front and the site targets written along the paddles, a nod to the many Māori staff at the factory and to a team that only moves when everyone pulls in time. The second fills a giant cookie jar with the whole biscuit family, each one holding up a target, Cookie Bear waving from the lid and the Griffin’s roundel stamped on the glass. Wiri, the snacks factory, got the other two. The snack brands ride a rollercoaster through the clouds with the year’s improvements written in the sky, because the Wiri plant sits a short drive from Rainbow’s End and the loops of a coaster are a fair picture of a factory year. And the same chips, bars and onion rings line up in black jerseys for a rugby match, the targets up on the scoreboard, for a workforce that understands a team game better than a KPI.
Every character is hand-drawn in the warm, rounded Griffin’s style, big-eyed and cheerful, so the art reads as fun from the car park and as a scoreboard up close. Wall mural design at this scale lives or dies on the install, so each piece was built for its wall: reception feature walls indoors, a full exterior wall on the Wiri building, and smaller versions for framed prints and a tote bag.
A factory goal written as a number gets read once. Drawn by the team as a biscuit in a waka, it gets talked about, which is what good illustration does for a workplace, and the sort of signage a brand as loved as Griffin’s deserves on its own walls.
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