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Iconic honey bear bottle takes sassy turn with honey badger shape

With funds from Kickstarter, three friends develop a bold BBQ sauce packaged in a custom a honey badger-shaped bottle that overcomes a number of production challenges.

Pw 54309 Honey

Consumers used to seeing the cuddly bear-shaped bottle on store shelves for honey products will take a second look when they spot the packaging for new Honey Badger BBQ Sauce, the creation of three California friends with a “‘burning’ passion for spice and good BBQ,” according to the Honey Badger Products’ website. The company’s super-spicy honey-and-habanero sauce brand, originally developed in a home kitchen, gets its brand name and playful package shape from a popular YouTube video—it has nearly 63 million views and counting—that parodies a National Geographic program on the African honey badger.

In 2011, with the product formulation and package idea in hand, the fledging company raised nearly $50,000 on crowd funding website Kickstarter to put its homemade sauce recipe and badger bottle design into full-scale production. Initial 3D sketches of the bottle, created by a designer in England, established the distinctive structure of the container, which depicts a savage honey badger wrestling a cobra and includes fine details, such as the badger’s sharp snout and teeth, and other features that bring the image to life. However, these details presented multiple mold-making, production, filling, and labeling challenges.

To translate their vision to reality, Honey Badger Products worked with Berlin Packaging’s Studio One Eleven, which collaborated with mold maker Creative Blow Mold Tooling, blow molder Parker Plastics, and co-packer Arcobasso Foods to ensure the resulting bottle could be manufactured and filled.

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