My personal experience of prototyping for preparation for our LP Audit of Hershey’s has been very different from the class’s prototyping seminar earlier this semester. The latter was held under an extreme time crunch, making it rather hectic to assemble a quality prototype. However, my more recent experience has been a very drawn out, long-term process extending far outside of class.
Although our product technically is a chunk/crumble of chocolate, we are prototyping the packaging and not the chocolate itself. To be honest, we’ve been all over the place regarding the packaging. We want it to be similar to a typical, resealable bag of granola. And originally, we wanted to adopt Sun Chips’ biodegradable packaging as our premier feature, but we have since moved on from that concept and have focused primarily on what the visual appeal our packaging will convey to our buyers.
Our product isn’t meant to be inherently healthy — it’s obviously still Hershey’s chocolate. But we want to fit it into consumers’ diets that have a good balance between eating healthy and enjoying sweet and/or good tasting foods. This made branding our package rather difficult. We don’t want to overemphasize health benefits because that strays from the principles Hershey’s has established over the past century of dominance. They’ve never tried to make it seem like Chocolate is super healthy for people. However, we want our product to be one that is easily included in healthy foods (greek yogurt, granola, smoothie bowls, etc).
We settled with a simple design. Keeping the Hershey’s color scheme from their website, we added simple recipes to the back of the package, adjacent the nutritional facts, and have including a clear section on the front of the bag to give customers a visual preview of the chocolate crumbles. Perhaps the most pragmatic focus of our packaging is really emphasizing a partnership we will create between Hershey’s and a company known for healthy foods, like Chobani Yogurts. The crumbled chocolate alone doesn’t meet any needs of a consumer. It actually makes consuming chocolate less efficient (why not just buy a bar?). But, if we use our packaging to convey our partnership with a “healthy” company, we can give our potential consumer base a pathway to enhance the notoriously poor taste of most healthy foods.