Taste Tour: First Class Check-In

Sometimes the strongest creative idea is already in the room.

Park Square SPAR is an unusual retail environment. Aviation references are embedded throughout the store, including repurposed aircraft components and a real aircraft suspended above the retail floor.

Rather than introducing an activation that competed with that identity, we used it as the starting point.

Taste Tour: First Class Check-In transformed a journey through the supermarket into a journey around the world.

The objective was not simply to decorate different parts of the store.

We wanted to encourage shoppers to move through the environment differently: discovering products, departments and flavours through a narrative that gave them a reason to explore.

Guests effectively “checked in” before moving through a series of destination-inspired zones positioned throughout the store.

Each destination created an opportunity to connect visual storytelling with products already available within the retail environment.

Travel objects, maps, books, clocks, botanical elements and destination references created small worlds around those products without requiring the supermarket itself to stop functioning as a supermarket.

That distinction was important.

The activation needed to interrupt routine just enough to create curiosity without interrupting the practical purpose of the space.

The travel concept created a flexible framework through which very different categories could coexist.

Asian-inspired objects and tea rituals could introduce one destination. Tropical fruit and drinks could transport shoppers somewhere warmer. European references could create another atmosphere entirely.

Rather than grouping products only according to conventional supermarket categories, the activation temporarily gave them another context.

A product could become part of a destination.

A department could become a stop on the route.

And an ordinary shopping journey could become an opportunity for discovery.

The project reinforced an approach that continues to influence our experience design.

Not every environment needs to be transformed beyond recognition.

Sometimes the more interesting question is what already makes the place distinctive and how that can be amplified.

At Park Square SPAR, the aircraft, industrial details and aviation references already provided an extraordinary piece of storytelling infrastructure.

Our role was to recognise it and build outward from there.

The result was an activation that could only really belong in that particular store.

Taste Tour demonstrated how experience design can change the way people navigate an everyday retail environment without disconnecting them from its commercial purpose.

By combining place, narrative and product discovery, the supermarket became both the setting and the experience.