Since 2011, Costa Rican brand Natural Sins has offered its crispy mango, pineapple, coconut, and beet chips to consumers in its home country as well as in several other markets. In 2015, when the company decided to introduce its healthy chips to the U.S. market, it decided to redesign its packaging graphics to bring home the idea of “The Un-Potato Chip” to health-conscious consumers hungering for tasty snacks.
To take its stand-up pouches from blah to beautiful, Natural Sins enlisted the help of advertising and design agency LRXD. According to the agency, the design directive was to create eye-catching bags to appeal to Natural Sins’ broad target of professional women ages 22 to 60, yet still capture the simplicity of the all-natural snack, which contains only two ingredients—the fruit or veggie, and all-natural cane sugar.
Natural Sins’ original pouches were pleasant but generic looking. The SKUs tended to blend in with each other—and other snacks—on store shelves. They were pleasing to the eye with a warm, colorful, tropical look. However, the packaging copy was not quite so appealing. A colored swatch beneath the key art held the most prominent, and problematic, copy: “100% natural baked-dried fruit.”
When LRXD took over the packaging design project, the agency decided to market Natural Sins as something America could truly crunch on—a crispy snack chip. They just needed to show that the product was also a delicious, healthy alternative to the conventional potato version.
In the new design, a whole piece of fruit or vegetable is given the star treatment on each 1-oz package. The bottom portion of the produce is shown intact, while the upper is cut into wafer-thin slices. One slice is extracted, enlarged, and rotated to show the chip’s cross-section. This up-close view connotes healthy eating, simplicity, and freshness, which is echoed in the message at the top of each bag, “Just two ingredients.”
The background of each package is color-coordinated to each product SKU—burgundy for beet, green for coconut, gold for pineapple, and coral for mango. A halo draws the eye to the center, and a radial effect saturates each package’s coordinating color at the edges. This formula of bold color and a single visual tells the distinct story of the product and keeps it simple in a busy shelf set.
While maintaining this minimalist design aesthetic, LRXD added more visual cues to enhance Natural Sins’ healthy alternative positioning and win over shoppers. A series of icons communicate that the chips are gluten-free, non-GMO, certified vegan, Paleo-friendly, and Kosher. And just in case the art and color cues don’t convince shoppers that this product is special, a dark brown color-block text strip at the top right of the bag reinforces this message by calling Natural Sins “The Un-Potato Chip.”
Finally, the packaging was given a subdued cargo motif, graced with a leaf-carved logo and “stamped” with the name of the fruit they bore in a no-frills font. A map of Costa Rica, the product’s origin, is lightly screened in the background.
The pouch is constructed, from the outside, of biaxially oriented polypropylene/aluminum/coextruded polyethylene and is gravure-printed in four colors by Costa Rican firm Indelsa.
