Nabati: Repositioning Indonesia's Wafer Brand for a Global Market
From warung shelves to international retail: brand strategy, logo design and a packaging system built to travel and drive market growth.
How Komunikasia Repositioned Nabati From a Warung Brand to an International Wafer Brand
Komunikasia Cato Brand Partners developed the brand strategy, the Nabati logo and the packaging system that repositioned Nabati as a premium-affordable wafer brand. The work moved Nabati from Indonesia’s warung channel into modern trade, attracted younger urban buyers, and gave the brand packaging credible enough to compete as an imported product in China. The packaging system covered product lines including Richeese, Richoco, Siip, Ahh and Nextar.
The Challenge: A Familiar Wafer Brand, Stuck in the Warung
Nabati had a design problem that looked like a distribution problem. The brand was everywhere in Indonesia: cheap, familiar, trusted. But it was stuck in the warung channel and invisible to the urban millennial and Gen Z consumers driving Indonesia’s modern trade growth.
Younger buyers wanted products that fit their aesthetic and lifestyle. Nabati’s packaging, designed for price-point visibility on a roadside shelf, wasn’t speaking that language. In supermarkets and convenience chains, it read as a low-cost option rather than a brand worth choosing.
And in China, the brand had no language at all. With no recognition or history there, the packaging had to do the work of earning trust from the first time a shopper saw it.
The Objective: Keep Mass Affordability, Earn Modern Trade and Export Shelf Space
The brief was to hold what Nabati had, genuine mass affordability and national familiarity, while building a visual identity capable of earning shelf space in modern trade formats across Indonesia and in retail channels in China.
That meant solving two problems at once:
Upgrade perception without raising the barrier. The packaging had to look more considered and contemporary without signalling to existing buyers that Nabati had become too expensive for them.
Build one system that works in two very different markets. It had to graduate into Indonesian modern trade and land as a credible imported product in China, without splitting into two unrelated identities.
The Solution: A New Nabati Logo and a Packaging System Built to Travel
Komunikasia Cato Brand Partners developed the brand strategy, the Nabati logo and the full packaging system to achieve both goals without abandoning either.
The positioning was built around premium-affordable, which gave the design work a clear commercial logic. Nabati would be neither a luxury product nor a commodity, but something a younger urban buyer could choose without feeling like they were settling. The Nabati logo was redesigned to carry that positioning: recognisable enough to keep the brand’s warung-built familiarity, and refined enough to sit credibly in modern trade and on export shelves.
The packaging system was built to scale across product lines, including Richeese, Richoco, Siip, Ahh and Nextar, and across borders. It carried consistent brand signals that read as deliberate and contemporary rather than merely cheap and cheerful.
In Indonesia, it needed to graduate from the warung into supermarkets and convenience chains without losing the recognition that had built the brand. In China, it needed to land as a credible imported product.
The Outcome: One of the World’s Largest Wafer Brands
Nabati is now one of the world’s largest wafer brands. The Indonesian and Chinese markets both contributed to that growth, the logo and the packaging system Komunikasia Cato Brand Partners built is part of what made the brand’s international expansion viable from a retail standpoint.
