Cocoon Snacks
This project was about the creation of a take away business. We had to make an exhaustive market study and create an innovative business concept, from the food, how the selling is going to go and where, how you will eat it, who will buy it, among more points.
We choose Entomophagy, since it was an unknown issue for us. We were curious about it and we thought is a very interesting topic and at the same time different. Our thought was to create a business as a way of approaching the population the intake of insects.
In our research, we saw that insects were eaten for millions of years. Since the homo habilis, passing through Greece and Rome, until nowadays. So we thought eating them should not be strange. Currently, in our culture, it is re-appearing as an exotic food and even used in haute cuisine, but it is not totally approved.
After a long process of searching we came with the idea of: "What would the world look like through the eyes of an insect?". The question for us was its life cycle:
egg - larva - pupa - butterfly.
We realized that pupa is the state through which some insects pass in the course of the metamorphosis, that takes them from larva to adult form. During that process, they hide in a capsule, to protect themselves while thansformation.
It is, therefore, a phase of "relative apparent inactivity", as it is now their consumption.
With all this, our business was born: "Cocoon Snacks"
We did a long research, interviewing random people in the streets, and we arrive to the conclusion that the majority of people, at least in our city, don't want even to try them, just because they are insects. For our business to succeed, we should change the way of consume them. We decide to create an snack, based in insect flour and ingredients, with a shape similar to a mochi, that will be sell in a pack that would represent the chrysalis. Our recipes would be inspired by the 5 continents, using aromas and spices of each one of them.
This last step make us think about the color scheme we would like to use for each, and also the materials for the box and ingredients we wanna use for the snacks.
Our structural packaging design was always inspired by the cocoon, and the geometrical shapes that you can find in the insects body parts, also representing the future of architecture and other constructions. When you open, you discover the snack, our "insect turned into butterfly"
We made a long process of sketching, by hand and digitally with Illustrator and Photoshop, and printing process. For the develop of the art work we use a lot of elements and we realized that, as we wanted to sell gourmet snacks, we have to be delicate, simple and elegant, and at the same time, the user should be tempted by it and find the relation between the name and the product.
Our final logo it is typographical, with an small twist of a cocoon at the end of the name.
The same as all other projects we made in the master degree, we made a presentation to our classmates and tutors. The impressions were pretty good in all of them. We can say we surprised our tutors with the final result, after a long process of failure in the concept and prototypes. What we could learn about this project is: never give up. If you feel blocked, try a different perspective. All is worthy at the end.
Team by Sofía Cuba, Yolanda Sabuz, Sandra Solanas
Tutorized by Emili Padrós, Ion Elola
Master in Packaging Design - ELISAVA 2017
