Riega,built in 3D.
Five years of 3D for a Kansas City organic seasoning brand, from sculpted worlds for its Bowls pouches to every product image for its new packs.
A shelf of seasoning packets, made to feel like objects.
Riega makes organic seasoning mixes, dips and salts in Kansas City and sells them in grocery stores and online. Most of the range comes in small flat pouches, and a flat pouch is hard to sell from a screen. Each project here made the packs read as things you could pick up: lit and turning, with the print sitting on the material.
The packaging design and illustration are Riega's. Every pack was built from the brand's print files, so the renders carry the real artwork. Mason's part was the 3D: the pouch, shaker, jar and case models, the materials, the lighting, the sculpted bowls and their worlds, and the animation.
- Client
- Riega Foods, Kansas City
- Agency
- Whiskey Design, Kansas City
- Lines
- Bowls, Skillet and Sheet Pan prep, Street Tacos, Tex-Mex, Superfoods, Flavor Shakers, Dips and Dressings, Quick and Easy, Crunches, Seasoned Salts
- Used on
- riegafoods.com product pages; the 2026 set was made for Amazon, Walmart and other e-commerce listings
- Tools
- Cinema 4D; Redshift for the 2026 set
The pouch art, sculpted.
The Bowls line's pouches are drawn as animals that double as bowls: a salmon, a cow, a chicken. For the line's new packaging, those drawings were rebuilt as sculpted 3D objects with a hand-made, clay-and-glaze surface, and the pouches were set into the worlds around them.
One bowl per pouch, one world per bowl.
The salmon bowl came first, in autumn 2021. The chicken bowl for Zesty Lime Chicken followed that December as a texture study on Riega red, and the salmon got its own grass-world film in May 2022. The same glaze and clay carry from object to object, so the set reads as one family.
Every pouch, front and back.
For the 2022 range, every pouch was rendered from its print file: Bowls, Skillet and Sheet Pan prep, Street Tacos, Tex-Mex and Superfoods. That's 31 fronts and 31 backs, rendered in a few days around the start of September. The flat packets came from one scene and the stand-up Superfoods pouches from their own, so the whole range lines up on a product grid.
Turn it over.
A pouch's back carries the directions and the nutrition panel, and shoppers want to read both sides. Every back was rendered on the same pouch as its front, and a short turntable takes a pouch from front to back and round again. Small cuts of the turns were made as hover loops for product pages.
Glass, label, and what's inside.
The shaker jars needed a third material: the seasoning itself, seen through clear plastic. Everything Bagel, garlic salt, Hatch green chili, pink salt and taco seasoning each got their own grain, colour and fill line, behind a paper label and under a black cap.
A new look, 55 renders in two weeks.
Riega's new packs are loud and fully illustrated, and they needed e-commerce images for Amazon, Walmart and the brand's own site, fast. The print files arrived on May 26, and the full set went to the client on June 10.
The scope was 17 SKUs across four lines. Each SKU got a three-quarter front, a back showing the nutrition panel and an 8-count case pack, and each line got a lineup: 55 hero images in all. One pouch scene and one carton scene did the work: a scripted material build turned the 34 front and back print files into 51 materials, so every SKU shares the same model, light and camera.
From print file to pouch.
Each render starts as the flat front panel from the printer's file. On the pouch it picks up what the file can't show: the curve of a filled packet, the crimped seals top and bottom, and the shine of the film catching the light.
Each render is 1200×2000, the shape the product pages use.
Front, back, case pack, lineup.
Retail listings ask for more than a front. The case pack was built from the printer's dieline, so its die-cut front and pattern sit where they will on the real carton.
New jars, full of crunch.
The Crunch seasonings came next, in a new shaker jar, and two Seasoned Salts followed in July. The fills are the hard part here. Each Crunch is a coarse mix of toasted flakes, garlic and seeds, so each got its own 3K texture set, with colour, displacement, normal and roughness maps, to sit behind the label at the right grain.
Still on the shelf, online.
Product imagery for riegafoods.com, spanning the 2022 range and 2026 packaging update.
- Street Tacos and Tex-Mex2026 pouch fronts and backs on the product pages, and both lineups on the line page
- Quick and Easy, Dips and Dressings2026 pouch fronts
- Crunches and Seasoned SaltsThe 2026 jar and shaker renders
- Flavor ShakersThe 2022 shaker renders, still in use four years on
Packaging that has to sell from a screen? Start a project ↗