Future Snack Design Competition 2026

Competition Brief

Future Snack Design 2026 is an open international product design competition hosted on Desall, an Italian crowdsourcing design platform, and commissioned by an anonymous leading company in the food and beverage sector. The competition invites designers, creatives, and product developers aged 18 and above to develop an innovative snack concept, either sweet or savory, targeting young consumers aged 15 to 40.

The brief is private in the sense that the sponsoring brand has chosen to remain unnamed throughout the competition period. This is a single-winner product design contest with a total prize pool of €7,000, split between a first prize and an optional extra award for the purchase of non-winning project licences. Participation is free and open to all nationalities.

Intent

The competition does not ask for engineering specifications or manufacturing blueprints. It asks for a credible, production-plausible snack concept that integrates product design, branding, naming, visual identity, and packaging into a coherent and distinctive system. The central challenge is simultaneously a food product design problem and a brand identity problem: the winning proposal must stand out through personality, contemporary relevance, and the overall consumption experience it delivers to its target audience.

Purpose

This is a client-driven commercial design brief. The sponsor is actively seeking concepts it may develop or license for real-world production. Beyond the first prize, the Extra Award mechanism allows the sponsor to purchase the exploitation licence for any non-winning submission for an additional €2,000, meaning any submitted project may be acquired regardless of its final ranking. Participants should be aware of this intellectual property dimension before submitting.

Requirements

The snack may be sweet or savory, conceived as a single product or as a system declinable into multiple variants. It must be positioned for everyday and informal consumption moments: school breaks, on-the-go consumption, social activities, and leisure. Formats should favour single-serving solutions or easily shareable formats compatible with retail distribution. The project must include product definition, naming, brand personality and values, visual language, and packaging concept. Ingredients should reflect current consumer trends toward clean label, functional, high-protein, and gut-health-oriented formulations, with contemporary flavour profiles including sweet-spicy, citrus, and spicy combinations. Each submission requires a minimum of 1 image and up to 5 images in 4:3 format (JPG, GIF, or PNG, maximum 1MB each) plus an optional ZIP file containing 3D files and high-resolution versions, up to 100MB.

An optional concept review is available: participants may save a draft and request feedback from the Desall team by 12 May 2026. This review is non-mandatory and provides no advantage in the final evaluation by the sponsor.

Jury

The selection of the winner is conducted exclusively by the anonymous sponsoring company. There is no published jury panel. The sponsor’s decision is described as unquestionable. Evaluation is weighted as follows: Degree of Innovation (5/5, highest priority), Aesthetic Quality (4/5), Functionality (4/5), Technical Feasibility (3/5), Economic Sustainability (3/5).

Registration Fees

Participation is entirely free. Participants may submit one or more projects. All submissions must be published on desall.com through the dedicated contest upload page.

Prizes and Rewards

The Extra Award is not a guaranteed prize but an option right: the sponsor may choose to purchase the economic exploitation licence of any non-winning submission for €2,000. This applies to any participant regardless of ranking. Participants should read the Contest Agreement carefully regarding intellectual property transfer before submitting.

Key Dates

✦ ArchUp Competition Review

Future Snack Design sits outside the typical scope of architectural or spatial design competitions, landing instead in the territory of product and brand identity design. It is a commercially motivated brief with a real potential end use: the sponsor is actively seeking concepts to develop or license, which gives the brief genuine stakes beyond recognition alone. The anonymity of the sponsoring company is a deliberate choice that limits the participant’s ability to contextualise their proposal within an existing brand ecosystem, though it also removes constraints around existing visual identities. The Extra Award mechanism is notable and should be read carefully: the sponsor retains the right to acquire any non-winning submission’s exploitation licence for €2,000, which is a meaningful intellectual property consideration that participants should factor into their decision to submit. There is no published jury, no named evaluators, and the selection process is entirely opaque, which is the primary transparency concern. The €5,000 first prize and free entry make the financial proposition straightforward. For designers working across product and spatial design disciplines, this is a legitimate if commercially oriented brief with a clear client intent behind it.

Final Thoughts

Future Snack Design 2026 is a free-entry, commercially grounded product design brief with a €5,000 first prize and a real prospect of licence acquisition for non-winning entries. Participants should review the Contest Agreement regarding intellectual property terms before submitting. The upload phase closes on 17 September 2026 at desall.com.

Registration Deadline

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