Tacos Padre ‣ Cocktail label design

Tacos Padre is led by culinary mastermind Nick Fitzgerald, who cut his teeth at the culinary institution that is Pujol, Mexico City. With Tacos Padre, Nick is on a mission to bring the authentic flavours of true Mexican street food to London.

Those flavours are not only in the food, but also in the finely-balanced hand-crafted cocktails available at Tacos Padre’s Borough Market HQ. Applying the same care for quality ingredients and sophisticated flavours to the drinks, Tacos Padre’s cocktails became a quick success. To build on their popularity, the restaurant decided to make them available as a set of canned take-away cocktails too. Available in the taqueria, of course, but also online and through select retailers.

To help Tacos Padre scale the cocktail offering, monopo was invited to create a design system for the labels that could span across a wide variety of flavours and formats, while staying true to Tacos Padre’s sophistication and authenticity.

Tacos Padre breaks with the template of what Mexican food should taste and look like in the UK. Its focus on sourcing quality ingredients and balancing their flavours perfectly gives Padre a more mature approach to Mexican cuisine. 

For the canned cocktail branding, we wanted to continue on this basis and took inspiration from Mexico’s mid-century visual culture. A move towards modernism, away from muralism. We wanted to show off the flavour complexity of the cocktails and break with preconceived notions of what a tequila-based drink should look like.

To deliver a design system that would work across an ever-expanding range of flavours, within a tight turnaround, we built the branding around two core components: typography-driven designs with distinctive colours.

While exploring a design system for the whole range of drinks, we also explored how illustration could play a role in the visual identity. Inspired by mid-century designs and Saul Bass illustrations, we explored an illustration style that would allow us to easily produce a wide range of designs for now and in the future. The designs explore how we could represent the different key ingredients of the drinks, with a candid style working in tandem with the iconic broken-style typography of Tacos Padre.