Pocket Sauce

I don’t eat anything without sauce, so I designed a way to carry my favorites everywhere.

Role: Concept, illustration, packaging, art direction, photography
Duration: 1.5 weeks, self-initiated
Team: Solo
Tools: Procreate, Illustrator, Photoshop, Canon camera, my favorite sauces

01 The idea

A personal habit, turned into a product.

Food without sauce doesn’t feel finished to me. At home that is easy; on the go, it isn’t, because the sauces I actually want rarely come in anything smaller than a bottle. Pocket Sauce started from that small, real frustration: what if flavor were something you carried, like keys or a phone?

Instead of treating sauce as something tied to a meal, the brand treats it as an everyday accessory; portable, personal, and a little spontaneous. I directed the concept and made every part of it myself.

Sauce-covered hands gripping a bottle of hot sauce

02 The packets

Nine sauces, nine personalities.

I drew every packet in Procreate: a wobbly zigzag edge like a torn seal, one bottle in the middle, and the sauce name in loose handwriting. Each sauce gets its own color, so the flavor reads before the words do. Working digitally let me iterate quickly while keeping one consistent hand across color, texture, and form.

I then placed the drawings into foil packet mockups and refined the lighting, shadows, and texture in Photoshop, so the flat illustrations read as real packaging you could tear open.

Balsamic Glaze packet drawing — Balsamic Glaze

Lemon Juice packet drawing — Lemon Juice

Sweet Chili packet drawing — Sweet Chili

Italian Dressing packet drawing — Italian Dressing

Top: the Procreate drawings. Bottom: the same designs on foil packets.

03 Packaging

A box you open like a snack, not a spice rack.

The packets travel in a kraft box lined with tissue printed in the same zigzag squiggles as the packet edges. Five flavors stand in a row, so opening the lid feels like choosing, and any one of them slips straight into a pocket or a lunch bag.

Open kraft box with squiggle-printed tissue holding five Pocket Sauce packets

04 Build your box

Your turn: pick five.

Every box holds five packets, tucked into tissue printed with the same squiggles as the packet edges. Choose the sauces you’d carry, and they drop into the box. Tap a packet in the box to take it back out.

Choose up to 5 sauces.

POCKET SAUCE

05 On the road

A brand about portability should move.

I extended the brand onto moving trucks, so the ads travel across the city the way the packets travel in a pocket. The trucks are both a literal and a conceptual vehicle for the product; they also borrow the familiarity of food trucks, which ties the brand to how people already experience food in everyday life.

06 The campaign

Messy on purpose.

The campaign was shot on a Canon: sauce everywhere, straight from the bottle, no plate in sight. The tone is lighthearted because the brand is about individuality and spontaneity, not about being polite at the table.

Tipping a sauce bottle straight into the mouth in front of a sauce shelf

Sitting at a desk by a window, tipping back a bottle

Sauce-covered hands holding a hot sauce bottle

Sauce around the mouth, holding a hot sauce bottle

Sauce smeared across the face in front of the shelf

07 Takeaway

Designing from my own habit taught me to design for someone else’s.

Pocket Sauce is a small, personal project, but it follows the same move as my UX work: notice a real friction in everyday life, then design the object that removes it. For anyone who eats the way I do, it turns “I wish I had my sauce” into a packet already in their pocket.