Enjoy Life revamps packaging to emphasize allergy-friendly branding, mainstream appeal

02-Nov-2017 - Last updated on 02-Nov-2017 at 13:20 GMT

Bold new packaging, streamlined branding and even cleaner ingredient decks will boost the appeal of Enjoy Life’s snacks and baking mixes to its core allergy-suffering consumer-base as well as more mainstream shoppers, a company spokeswoman predicts.

Beginning in October, all of Enjoy Life packages will sport bright teal backgrounds that will help the product standout on store shelves with better brand blocking, said Kasey Moss, a company representative who recently attended the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo in Chicago.

Moss explained that as an allergy-friendly brand, Enjoy Life products are not always in the same place in stores, which can make them hard to spot.

“With the teal packaging, it will be easier to find our products on shelves because they will all be one color. Right now, it is kind of hard to tell what is what because depending on the store, we are not always in the same place in the store. We could be in the gluten-free set or the natural set or sometimes the products are actually in line with regular products,” so shoppers who need allergy-friendly options sometimes have to hunt for Enjoy Life products, she said. “But with the teal, it will be better brand recognition and brand blocking on the shelf for the consumers to find us more easily.”

The choice to use teal also is a fast indicator to allergy sufferers that products are safe for them to eat, Moss said, explaining the color “is a nod to the food allergy community, which is obviously very important to us, as teal is the food allergy awareness color.”

Streamlined branding

The teal also helps the brand’s signature white oval in a red outline standout – a move that aligns with the company’s broader mission to clarify which products it owns, Moss said.

To further support this goal, Moss added the company will eliminate sub-branding, which has confused some consumers.

“Some of our products, like ProBurst Bites and Plentils chips, were sub-branded, and some weren’t. It was confusing for consumers because some people thought Plentils were a stand-alone brand and they were not correlating them with Enjoy Life, and the values the company holds,” Moss said.

She added that as a company with more than 60 products, Enjoy Life wants consumers to know they all fall under the same umbrella brand.

A cleaner label

Enjoy Life products have always been free of the “big eight” allergens recognized by US regulators, but now they also are free-from the top allergens in Canada and the UK – bringing the total list of avoided allergens to 14, Moss said.

With such a long-list, Moss said the company moved the specific allergens from which products are free from to a side panel, which freed up space on the front of the pack to talk about what is in the products.

“A lot of times in gluten-free and allergy-friendly products, brands emphasize what is not in the package, such as no nuts, not dairy, and that can almost be a turn-off to people who don’t have food allergies. And we want our products to be for people who don’t have food allergies to eat, too,” Moss said.

She also noted that the focus on what is not in products has led some people to question what is in the product.

“We use really high quality ingredients and I think that is something that kind of gets wiped to the side. People think we are using a lot of fillers because they wonder what is in our products if we are not using those ingredients,” she explained.

“We want to shift the focus to our high quality ingredients and where we are sourcing them from,” which is why the free-from claims are now on the side and not the front of the pack, she said.

In the spirit of being transparent and having a clean label, Moss said Enjoy Life’s new line of Grain & Seed bars will not use palm oil – an ingredient that many consumers have told the company that they fear production of negatively impacts the environment.

“A lot of consumers are more worried about sustainability, and we are, too,” Moss said.

Some palm oil producers, such as the Malaysian government, say they are making significant strides to make production of the ingredient 100% sustainable in the near future. Moss recognized this effort and said that in the future the company’s position could change, but for today it is not comfortable using the ingredient in the new line snack bars.