About A Better Bite Ingredients

Many of the ingredients A Better Bite uses can be found within 30 km of their production kitchen in the hills of Northumberland County. The freshly milled whole grain flours are organically grown and milled near Marmora by Patricia Hastings at CIPM Farms. The butter comes from the Stirling Creamery, which produces one of the best butters in the world. Then they source other ingredients from organic, sustainable, fair trade and non-GMO certified sources, preferably from Ontario.

Another thing about A Better Bite is their recipes have been modified to be lower on the Glycemic Index but big in flavour and goodness. How awesome is that?

A Better Bite Products

We haven’t tried everything – but we have tried a lot of A Better Bite baking and it’s very tasty stuff. The Wheat Free Asiago Seedy crackers are delicious, not to mention the original seedy and apple cinnamon flavour. We’ve also tried the brownie mix with walnuts, biscotti, chocolate chip cookies and the newest product – energy bars made with locally-grown hemp. Check out their full product listing on their website.

Analysis and Recommendation for Packaging

Because A Better Bite is an artisan bakery, the production and packaging process is manual. So, we took this as a stupendous design challenge (since Actually has yet to gain an opportunity to design a package design) and sketched various concepts that incorporated a cracker box that could be sealed with stickers (applied by hand), and a paper sleeve that boasts the cracker name and description. A sticker would act seal for the top flap, and adhere the paper sleeve to the custom designed box that includes all ingredients.

With an exact mockup rendering, we contacted local packaging printers to get an idea of cost, time and print process feedback for the best output of producing a box for A Better Bite to hit the wholesale market.

Sketch of A Better Bite Cracker Packaging

We obtained quotes for sleeves and full custom designed boxes for A Better Bite cracker packages. It was our suggestion to consider the design of 7 cracker boxes since, automating the product assembly line, and eliminating additional costs for stickers, paper sleeves plus time and cost to assemble each. We also had to consider the internal packaging costs of cellophane and/or possibly a cracker tray, plus storage of the boxes.

Because of limited resources to go all-in for a full custom box we decided to proceed slowly, and make small design changes, testing the market before diving into production costs of a box. So we moved forward with the design of a full colour two sided hanging product tag that would be manually tied on.

Design and Development for Packaging

A Better Bite is really keen on warm colours, like reds, oranges and yellows, and loved the idea of incorporating simplistic repetitive geometric shapes to represent the high quality, distinctive product, made by hand using traditional methods – the true representation of a food artisan. But they didn’t want to go too earthy, with an over indulgence of kraft paper or eco-friendly type boxes and packaging.

So we came up with a few compositions that included a warm colour schemes. They were open to embracing refining the logo for structure, colour and rendering.  We proposed a few colours in the first round that strayed a bit from A Better Bite branding colours, but kept them within the warm hues.

Semi-Compositions of a Better Bite Product Tags

The first round of compositions brought on what we love the most – feedback. With the feedback we put together a final composition with a bit of fine tuning of font size, colours and layout. Here’s the final product that’s being used today on dry mixes and cracker packaging.

A Better Bite – Final Product Tags

What do you think of the design? Have you had a chance to try the yummie crackers, dry mixes, or energy bars? We invite you to leave your feedback in the comment section below.