Hello.

The other day I was wandering the snack aisle with my son looking at nuts – the snacks, that is, and not my fellow shoppers. Naively, he asked, so which one is the best nut?” A seemingly easy and innocent question. However, while surveying the ever expanding nut section, we realized that one of the last remaining bastions of healthy snacking was really beginning to look extremely unhealthy.

As a retail brand expert and package designer, I strive to leverage the power of design to appeal and engage consumers. However, in this case, I realized that packaging for the most part was not doing a very good job at helping the consumer to do what consumers do best which is consume! In a way, I felt sorry for the little nut and what the category had done to it. It had become a very confused nut.

Now, we all know how nutritious and healthy nuts are for you – unless you have a peanut allergy (but that’s another story…). So, packaging for this category should be pretty straightforward you’d think. Instead, we have chocolate covered and honey roasted these simple tasty treats into another category. And at the other end of the spectrum in the “gourmet” end of the shelf we have loaded and crowded it with endless taste variations passed off as gourmet so we now have barbeque, wasabi and even ranch! Since when is ranch considered gourmet yet alone healthy. It seems that our simple, healthy nuts have adopted the tastes and the look and feel of their white trash cousins, the (ahem.) lowly potato chip.

So the next time we get a nut job (packaging project, that is) in the studio, I think we’ll go back to attempting to restore some of the sanity and get back to focusing on not only what’s on the outside of the package, but what’s inside as well. And if you don’t like that, well, “nuts to you!”