Talking Chocolate
When the package outdoes itself and becomes a creative storyteller.
In the world of chocolate, it’s no longer just the contents that delight the consumer, but the container itself. In other words, the package.
Narrating, interacting and conveying the contents: from a simple wrapper for one of the world’s most loved foods, chocolate packaging has evolved into a means to communicate directly with the consumer.
We’re not talking about the standard informational content printed on all food product containers. Here we mean actual creative storytelling applied to chocolate wrappers. Perhaps it was the very special goodness of the product inside the package that attracted several graphic designers from around the world to tackle the package design concept. From Central Europe to South America, passing through Italy and Greece, several graphic designers have tried their hand at creating innovative packaging to dress up chocolate in some new clothes.
From Hungary comes a fictional chocolate brand called “Artur” with an experimental packaging design concept for nutritional information by graphic designer Batke Bendegúz. But that’s not all. This experimental chocolate packaging concept allows the customer to see the percentages of the all ingredients used in the product at a single glance thanks to a visual interface. What is more, this package would allow consumers to customize the size of each pastel-coloured field on the package to determine the percentage of particular ingredients.
From Hungary, we now move to Italy - to Tuscany to be precise - where we meet Fonderia del Cacao. This particular brand of artisanal chocolate is known for its “organic gourmet” products. To mark the Easter holiday, it launched a vegan chocolate egg made with soy milk, substituting the traditional wrapper with highly original packaging: white paper with the story of the egg printed on it.
Fonderia del Cacao is forging on with further product and packaging research along the same lines. Encouraged by the success of its Easter egg, this Italian chocolate brand will soon unveil a line of probiotic chocolate featuring nutritious seeds, grains or berries (hemp, flax, quinoa and goji berries). The packaging for these new products has a narrative format providing all the information on the nutritional value of the chocolate, the origins of the ingredients and the product’s properties. Did you know that goji berries, naturally loaded with potassium and magnesium, are powerful antioxidants? Fonderia del Cacao packaging tells the whole story in black printed on a white background, imitating a newspaper.
Continuing on with our packaging theme, we travel from Italy all the way to Cape Town. South African graphic designer Jane Says has designed the packaging for DV Chocolate, produced by Pieter De Villiers. 1st BATCH, artisanal chocolate, is wrapped in packaging that recounts the product’s entire history, from the country of origin (colour-coded) to notes describing its aromatic qualities. Can anyone seriously resist a chocolate bar with citrus, raisins and vanilla? Completing this elegant signature packaging is a red stamp with the crop batch number written by hand on each package, underscoring the product’s exclusivity.
The individual bars of chocolate are then slipped into a cardboard box. In addition to preserving the handmade quality, the box provides another opportunity to discover, by means of an intuitive and explanatory colour wheel printed on the inside of the lid, all the different varieties and gradations of flavour you’ll be enjoying as you eat the chocolate.
We end our mouth-watering travelogue with an original design, merely conceptual for now, from Greece. It is a packaging concept from Corn Studio designed to stimulate our emotions. The chocolate bars have wrappers with a geometric design in psychedelic colours. Each chocolate variety has its own name and a two-letter symbol inspired by the periodic table of the elements.
A short list of the emotions you can expect the chocolates to arouse is also printed on the wrapper. Do you need a moment of relaxation or burst of creativity? Would you like to feel more talkative? Happy and uplifted? Then Green Haze is just for you. All the benefits the soul needs. And it says so right on the package.
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