With the growing popularity of home-delivered meal kits, entrepreneurs Rebecca Sholiton and Nate Cooper seized on the opportunity to create a business around modular meal kits for parents wanting to feed their children healthy lunches, but without the time to prepare them. Chicago-based Eat Pak’d is an online service that offers kids’ lunches designed by nutritionists and crafted by chefs that are delivered fresh to the consumer’s door. The lunch components—for example, a meal might include pasta, salad, apples, and granola—can be ordered already assembled in a four-pack, or individual components can be ordered and mixed and matched at home.
To design packaging for the food items that would be both functional and fun for parents and for kids, in early 2016 Eat Pak’d tapped brand development and packaging design firm Anthem.
Says Tim James, Anthem’s Senior Director of Structural Packaging and Innovation, “We had two tiers of expectations. Initially, we wanted to make something that was more appealing than other off-the-shelf package solutions. As we progressed, it was apparent that there was also this whole idea of customization that was becoming more and more important to the brand, and ultimately to the end consumer.”
James says Anthem was given fairly free rein in determining the size and shape of the packaging, as Eat Pak'd had not yet acquired the packaging machines for the products. “Clearly, though, we had to work within realistic sizing for children,” he adds.
Among the research conducted during the design phase, Anthem audited e-commerce channels and grocery stores, and reviewed trends to identify key design opportunities. “We looked across a broad spectrum of lunch box/packaging formats, from Japanese Bento Boxes to nifty modular Tupperware-style containers,” explains James. “But ultimately, it came down to us embracing the intricacies of thermoformed trays and understanding how we can create a simple, modular format that is easy to understand and use, while also being affordable to produce.”
