PARTNER

Designing healthy chocolate

If you’re anything like me, you absolutely love chocolate. The smooth, creamy, decadent taste of chocolate reminds you of family celebrations and has become associated with love and happiness. It’s so good, but also not always the most healthy. I wanted to know, was there anything out there that was healthier, but still allowed me to indulge in my favorite dessert?

As I dove into my exploration of chocolate, I began to find that there actually were more healthy chocolate alternatives that still tasted amazing. There were some companies offering chocolate without sugar, which is meaningful because sugar contributes to heart disease and a myriad of other health problems. I wanted to help raise awareness around this and bring decadent, delicious, healthy chocolate into people’s lives. That’s where my partnership with Lily’s Sweets came in. Lily’s Sweets offers healthy chocolate by ensuring every product is sweetened without refined or processed sugars. They use stevia instead and gluten free ingredients— all while ensuring the chocolate still tastes great.

In 2020, Lily’s Sweets came to my design team wanting us to answer the question, “How might we increase the household penetration of Lily’s Sweets to 10% despite the sampling limitation introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic?” 

We carried out the design thinking process and came up with innovative ideas that were implemented by the company.

01. Empathize 

We spoke to chocolate lovers and chocolate industry professionals to learn more about the space. From our interviews, we uncovered the following themes:

  • Appealing packaging is important

  • Health is important to consumers and natural sweeteners are a motivator for people to purchase Lily’s Sweets

02. Craft a point of view statement

From these insights, we were able to craft the following point of view statement: Eve is a 50-year-old health-conscious woman who loves chocolate, and needs a way to easily identify Lily’s Sweets and understand its amazing healthy benefits.

This statement informed our ideation, prototyping, and testing.

03. Ideate & Prototype

During our brainstorming sessions, we focused on 1) creating a unique, educational package design and 2) redesigning the size of the chocolate bars. 

For the packaging our hope was to catch consumer’s attention through highlighting the health benefits of Lily’s Sweets. We wanted to emphasize that no sugar was added, that the bars were gluten free, and utilize bright red lettering to make the packaging stand out.

When focusing on product size, we hoped to attract more health-conscious consumers by implementing a much smaller size. This smaller size would appeal to consumers who are currently on portion-controlled diets or those who wished to try the product for the first time. 

Once we had a usable prototype, we entered into the next phase of design thinking, testing.

04. Testing and iteration

We tested our prototype with four users and found:

  • People unanimously liked the small package size.

  • One interviewee did not like the language “stevia sweetened” in big font on the bar because she felt like she was more likely to experience a harsh aftertaste that stevia sometimes gives off.

  • Two interviewees said they would like to see more eye-catching designs to draw them in. They wanted to see brighter colors.

We utilized this consumer feedback to create our second prototype. In our second prototype, we added a picture of the actual Lily’s chocolate and simplified the background. We also implemented Lily's vertical theme. We presented this prototype to Lily’s Sweets and received great feedback from their CEO, who particularly liked the smaller packaging aspect of our prototype.

05. Implementation

Today, smaller packaging with bright colors has been implemented by Lily’s Sweets and is meeting the needs of chocolate lovers and health aficionados across the country.

Learnings

Since I’m such a chocolate lover and health conscious person, this project incredibly fun and insightful as I bonded with other likeminded foodies. It was really interesting to bring users in along the way to test our prototypes. I saw how important it was to leverage our empathy interviews, which allowed us to design bite sized chocolate bars with bright, health-conscious packaging, which is being implemented by Lily’s Sweets today.

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