PACKAGING
The goal:
Redesign a randomly chosen chocolate wrapper.
(Courtesy of my packaging professor)
My assigned chocolate bar came all the way from Ghana, produced by the tiny Los Angeles company LetterPress Chocolate.
(Right) The original package I was given. (Left) LetterPress's official product shot, from Letterpresschocolate.com.
A whopping 11$ per bar and 100% cacao, LetterPress prides itself on “Direct Trade” sourcing rather than Fair Trade, requiring a much stricter code of ethics and partnering directly cocoa farmers.
Their bottom line was to pay cocoa farmers high wages. How do we highlight that?
I started by asking what kinds of customers would most appreciate LetterPress’s values. Looking at consumer data from “health food” retailers, I concluded that foodies would find many benefits of LetterPress bars quite appealing.
Ethical sourcing ✔
Wholesome ingredients ✔
Something new to try ✔
One of the first measures I took was slightly modifying the logo to better broadcast information that would appeal to foodies, changing the bottom line to “Bean to Bar,” leaving room to include “Direct Trade” on the label.
Because no vector file of the logo was publicly available, I had to recreate every individual detail by hand in Illustrator to properly make changes.
For my specific Ghana bar, I was actually inspired by LetterPress’s special bar from Peru, which shows a faithful replication of a pattern the owners had seen in the country.
I decided to similarly find a pattern from Ghanan culture to use on the package instead of the coat of arms. I found that one fabric pattern recognizable to most Ghanans was the “Felicia pattern.”
These two elements would be integral to the final design:
Highlighting foodie selling points, tasting notes and ingredients are now more emphasized. In lieu of company's old postage theme, I added a postal stamp of the Ashanti people, who supplied these specific beans. The cacao content is also now moved to the top to make it easy to flip through at the store.
Pop quiz: Without reading the text, can you tell which bars are 100%, 70% and 50% cacao?
Photographs by Letterpresschocolate.com
…probably not.
I especially wanted to address the confusion telling bars with different cacao contents apart. In its current form, the packages only distinguish less dark chocolate with slightly different (and perhaps arbitrary) colors. My idea was to instead use gold foil for 100%, silver for 70%, and bronze for 50%, hypothetically for all bars.
Flat designs for the silver and bronze versions. They included more ingredients than the 100% dark version, so I needed to make sure the backside could accommodate either way.
This project was a wonderful educational exercise, although I do remember finally getting to taste the bar after all this time… and realizing I definitely do not like 100% chocolate. Oh well!