Loco Letter
Utilising waste materials to create a desirable and sustainable packaging design for premium chocolate.
Project description
Challenge
Chocolate letters are a form of candy associated with the Dutch holiday of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas). Celebrants of Sinterklaas are traditionally given their initials made out of chocolate annually on December 5th. Despite the heart-warming nature of the tradition, each year more than 1 million chocolate letters, including the packaging, are destroyed as left over waste products.
Solution
‘Loco Letter’ helps reduce such waste by offering the same premium chocolate concept but rethinking the design to reduce waste. Typically, chocolate letters require 26 individual skus to match the 26 letters of the alphabet using fixed molds.
‘Loco Letter’ uses just one sku made of 30 small blocks of both light and dark chocolate – the color contrast of each block and puzzle nature of the design provides consumers with the ability to create any letter they like.
Taking this one step further and because such an eco-friendly product deserves a sustainable packaging solution, Loco Letter have created a new packaging design concept.
The packaging design uses paperboard made from combining the shells of the Cacao fruit with FSC fibers. The premium transfer finishing with metallic mirror effect will be made from recycled materials. Using a combination of what are inherently waste materials helps elevate Loco Letter into both a desirable and sustainable brand.
Two concrete innovations have been applied:
All traditional printing/decoration has been replaced by hot-foil printing, which leaves only a 0.001-micron thick layer of metal (aluminium) on the packaging material. A closed-loop recycling system has been created for the thin PET carrier used to transfer the metal. This foil is returned to a facility where 99% is recycled into granulate for injection moulding or blow moulding for a wide variety of purposes.
In addition, a new material has been applied for the lid and the box. It is made of fibres from the cocoa-bean shells, combined with FSC certified wood fibres. The combination of these two innovations results in highly attractive packaging and significantly reduces the CO2 footprint of the packaging by 53%.
