Chocolate is for the sweet-toothed what water is to fish – some of us we can’t imagine living without it.
If you’re like me, you love everything about chocolate. “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips”, they say.
But what about chocolate packaging? Is it that elusive and ephemeral as the decadent treat, or does it matter more than we think?
In this article, we’ve gathered the best chocolate packaging we produced for our clients. We’ll examine and take inspiration from:
- creative chocolate bars packaging boxes
- affordable chocolate box sleeves
- chocolate display boxes
- confectionery and candy boxes
…all of them printed in-house at our facility in Springfield, Oregon. Seeing what design options our clients chose for their confectionary delights will surely give you an imagination boost.
There’s great power in chocolate packaging. Let’s see how you can fuel up your own.
Chocolate packaging as a marketing tool
Did you ever happen to be dumbfounded by the looks of the packaging of a certain product? You’ve probably more than once purchased a product just because it looked good.
In fact, many studies have demonstrated that the way packaging looks, starting with the materials, and down to the colors you choose can even affect how customers perceive the taste of your product and whether they want it or not.
To get things started, we’re going to dive into a little bit of marketing, because you can use packaging as a marketing tool quite effectively.
We’re going to adapt the AIDA Formula – most commonly used for copywriting – to your chocolate packaging. This way, you’ll have a guide to return to when it comes to designing your chocolate packaging.
The formula includes the four steps your potential customer needs to go through, from when they first see your product, to making the purchase. The initials come from A – Attention, I – Interest, D – Desire, and A – Action.
Let’s see how this formula works.
Step 1: Grabbing Attention
Here’s the thing…
No matter how good-tasting your chocolate is, you can’t lead people into purchasing if they don’t even notice your box. That’s why the design of your chocolate packaging is important in itself and in relation to the brands you’re competing with. The sale begins with eye-contact.
Let’s examine the chocolate shelf in the picture below.
If you were to take a quick look at it, which of the packaging grabs your attention the most?
Example 1 stands out for three reasons:
- Size: the chocolate bars are not standard sized, they’re taller.
- Color: the wrappers have one bold color and a simple look, while the other chocolates display more colors.
- Presentation: the company also has a chocolate display box, as opposed to the other chocolates that are just arranged on the shelf.
Example 2:
- Size: the chocolate bars are bigger and thicker than the other standard bars.
- Color: while the other chocolate packaging is colorful, this one is brown. This creates a color contrast that helps them stand out more.
- Details: they are the only ones who have a window on their chocolate box.
Example 3 has a totally separate custom made chocolate shelf! Although it involves an investment, this separation sends a powerful message: we are different, we are not like the rest. Chocolate like ours deserves this kind of packaging.
You can see how the rest of the chocolate boxes do not stand out on the shelf as much.
Key takeaway:
How does your chocolate packaging need to look in order to make your potential customers aware of your product?
Take your time and think about how you can use colors, textures, and shapes when designing your chocolate packaging so it draws your customers in.
Step 2: Building Interest
Granted you have grabbed people’s attention, your next goal is to turn attention into interest.
How do you turn attention into interest through your packaging?
At this stage, it’s useful to get into your customer’s shoes and think what do you usually do after picking up a chocolate?
You turn it over so you can see the back panel, right?
This is the space you can use to talk about the quality of your product or any other features or characteristics that are important to your target audience. You can even add a story or talk about the mission of your product.
Let’s take a look at what our clients from Pono Chocolate did. First, they start with a saying: “Life is Ono when you live Pono”.
Now…what does Ono and Pono even mean? Most people won’t know what that means, and this creates curiosity.
The customer then must read the rest of the story to get his answer.
Key takeaway:
What is it about your chocolate or confections that will make people interested?
Use all the panels of the chocolate boxes, chocolate bars, or sleeves to communicate what’s in it for your customers and reassure them that your product is the right choice.
Step 3: Fueling Desire
If your product meets your customers’ needs, they’ll want to have it. But many products do meet our needs at a technical level, and still, most of us have one or two favorite chocolate brands.
Why is that? The answer is an emotional connection.
You can create a desire for your product with a few well-thought and well-placed words that pull the customer into a relationship with your brand and form a connection.
Pono Chocolate continues to take the customer on a journey and create that personal connection. After they share the story of “Ono” and “Pono”, they immediately turn the attention to the customer with the message: “See what wisdom lies inside just for you.”
You’d instantly want to to find out what wisdom is waiting inside, right?
Then, the last message says: “100% of the profit from the sale of the OLA bar will be donated to PCF (Pacific Cancer Foundation).” The personal connection is established. With the last messages, they transformed the potential customer’s need or craving towards buying some chocolate into the desire to buy this specific chocolate bar for what it stands for.
Key takeaway:
Think about what your customers care about at a deep, emotional level and how can you convey that message into your packaging so they form an immediate connection with your product.
Step 4: Action (Purchasing)
You’ve seen how the purchase is driven by 1) attention, 2) interest and 3) desire. Besides these, the quality of the chocolate packaging materials, as well as the quality of the information you’re displaying, play a vital role.
Key takeaway:
Your goal when it comes to your chocolate packaging is to lead your customers through the four steps effortlessly.
If you manage to do that, the purchase will happen.
But why does chocolate packaging matter?
Don’t people just love chocolate, no matter the packaging? While an instinctual answer would be yes, we love chocolate no matter how the chocolate packaging looks like, the truth is not that simple.
You see, our brain associates beautiful packaging with quality products. And people want to use quality products. A quality chocolate packaging builds brand authority, and brand authority transforms into sales. So you can see where it all starts.
Plus, good-looking, desire-generating chocolate packaging doesn’t have to be expensive. At YourBoxSolution you’ll find fair prices and you’ll be in complete control of your order process, from start to finish.
Let’s dive into the beautiful chocolate packaging examples from our clients and we’ll help you get yours too by getting a quote for your chocolate box now.
Custom printed chocolate bar packaging
The chocolate packaging our clients create for their confections are as diverse as the chocolate flavors themselves. From very colorful, to very simple, these chocolate bars packaging all try to win the customer’s eyes first, to later winning their taste buds too.
Let’s take a look at their packaging and see what takeaways we can extract from each of them.
Vital Leaf Chocolate Bars Packaging
Design: Vital Leaf’s chocolate bars packaging come as simple and modern, with bold colors and dynamic art elements.
Box type: They chose a straight tuck box, in full-color print and a matte coating.
On the back panel, they display the most important information, including a blurb with their mission. Like we’ve previously mentioned, creating a connection should be a priority when it comes to packaging.
Another way they’ve packaged the confectionaries from Vital Leaf is in a variety pack. Each box contains their three different flavored chocolates, in smaller weights and packaged individually.
We’ve primed a simple straight-tuck box to house the smaller chocolates and their variety pack is ready to sell.
Custom Chocolate Bar Box for Moka Origins
Design: Moka Origins has a more classic approach to chocolate packaging, one that stands out through elegance. The modern logo in white color as a centerpiece is balanced by the simple, white lines on the lower half of the front. For the rest of the outer design, two colors and a simple coffee-cocoa-bean pattern does the job well.
What’s interesting about Moka Origins’ chocolate box is the inside print: they chose to print on the inside of the packaging too, sharing their story, the origins of the coffee and cocoa beans, complementing them with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations. At YourBoxSolution printing on the inside of the chocolate packaging only involves a small additional cost, so you can get creative without worrying about the budget.
Box type: custom box. Instead of a standard straight tuck or reverse tuck boxes that open at the top and bottom, they went with a custom box that closes with a slide-in flap on the back panel.
Coating: matte laminate.
Vibrant Chocolate Bar Boxes for Pono Chocolate
We’ve already showcased Pono Chocolate’s special edition bar above. This time, let’s take a look at the other assortments and chocolate boxes we printed.
The design: all the packaging design is inspired by Hawaiian culture and nature. What do you think about when you say Hawaii? Hibiscus flowers and strong colors, right? That’s exactly Pono’s design direction. Each chocolate box has the hibiscus flower along with other floral elements, against a daring background.
Box type: straight-tuck box.
Coating: gloss laminate.
TKO Bar Chocolates
The design: Here’s an example of how the combination of bold and light fonts creates a powerful design. The designers at TKO Products chose natural colors and assigned them to the specific chocolate type: light browns for milk chocolates and a darker brown for dark chocolate.
Box type: straight-tuck box.
Coating: spot gloss. You can choose to apply the gloss coating only in some areas of the box and leave others uncoated. This also creates a discreet embossing effect (best visible on the third picture).
Grön Chocolate Bar Box
The design: simple and effective: a cannabis leaf over different colored backgrounds to differentiate different types of cocoa contents.
Box type: straight-tuck box.
Coating: matte laminate.
Minimalist Style – Burroughs Chocolate
The design of the chocolate bars for Burroughs is also a simple one: three colors, a bold font for the logo and whites all the way.
Box type: straight-tuck box.
Coating: none.
Chocolate Bar Box with cutout
The design for Hilltop Farms’ Hydro Bar is clean and elegant. The name of the product is highlighted with an ornamental frame and stylish decorations. The cutout offers a glimpse to the bar inside the box.
Box type: reverse-tuck box with cutout.
Coating: gloss laminate.
Playful colors for Chocolate Spiel
The design: as their name implies, the design of their chocolate bar box is up to the challenge. Spiel means play in German, and that’s what they did with the chocolate bar box too: playful colors and their logo is also cheerful! There’s not very much going on with the fonts: simple and informative.
The box: straight-tuck box.
Coating: none.
Funny Chocolate Bar Box
The design: Here’s a lovely approach to chocolate packaging: a chocolate bar box that addresses the number one objection towards chocolate: although people love it, many won’t purchase because it has too many calories.
By addressing this objection in a funny way, chances are you’ll buy one just for the packaging, won’t you?
Box type: straight-tuck box.
Coating: none.
Kraft Chocolate Bar Box for Alaska Salt Co.
The design: brown kraft paperboard with black print can never be a wrong choice, no matter the product. Alaska Salt Co. went with a simple approach: a few salt crystals as design elements, together with the company and product name.
Box type: reverse-tuck box.
Coating: kraft paper is an uncoated paperboard, so no coating here.
Illustrated Chocolate Bar Box
The design: the creators at Loon Chocolate did a very smart move with their chocolate packaging: they printed the same box for all their assortments and differentiate the flavors with a different label that they stuck to the bottom of the box. Design-wise, it’s cheerful and has a hand-made look, which is what confectionery makers very commonly aim towards.
This way, they don’t have to worry about running out of packaging for a specific chocolate type, since all the boxes look the same.
Box type: custom box with two slide-in flaps on the side.
Coating: none.
Belgian Milk Candy Bar
The design: Here we have a chocolate box which colors make it look very appetizing: just brown shades that instantly make you think about decadent, creamy chocolate. Simple fonts and little wording complete the look.
Box type: straight-tuck box.
Coating: gloss coating.
Contrasting Colors for El Buen Cacao
The design: Another proof that simple is considered better. The chocolate bars packaging for El Buen Cacao features a cacao bean as its central element. An orange frame and the use of the complementary blue color makes everything stand out on the black background.
Box type: straight-tuck box.
Coating: matte laminate.
Hot foil stamping and metallic paper on chocolate bars packaging
Yes, you’ve read that right! Hot foil stamping for chocolate packaging is a thing, and so is metallic paper. At YourBoxSolution you can get both. Let’s see how they look!
Valhalla Chocolates
The design: Valhalla Chocolates‘ bar boxes all embrace hot foil stamping for all box panels. They used both gold foil stamping and silver foil stamping combined with color printing and the result is impressive.
Box type: straight-tuck-box.
Coating: none.
Hot Foil for Dwaar Chocolates
The design: the Dwaar logo is a central piece on the simple, pastels-colored chocolate boxes. They went with gold foil stamping and copper foil stamping for the front of the boxes, while on the back they framed the information with a white background.
Box type: straight-tuck box.
Coating: none.
Metallic Paper Print for WM Chocolate
The design: This is a fantastic combination: our custom metallic printing combined with areas of white and daring colors.
Watch the video on the right to see how colors behave on the metallic paper!
This is the beauty of printing on metallic paper: any color printed will look shiny, changing to different shades as light touches the surfaces.
For each chocolate flavor below, WM Chocolate have chosen different colors. This chocolate packaging looks like something I would keep just to have something pretty to look at!
Chocolate bar display boxes
We’ve seen how you can print individual chocolate bars into chocolate bar boxes and achieve all kind of different looks, from the minimalist ones to more complex designs.
Onward.
Let’s see some of the possibilities when it comes to chocolate bar display boxes.
Chocolate bar display boxes are ideal for selling your smaller confectionery items. Usually placed near the register or in places where customers are standing in line, they take advantage of impulsive buying and make it easier for your customers to grab one as they go.
We love the display boxes for Kefla chocolates. When they’re not open, the chocolate display boxes for Kefla look and behave like a regular box.
All it takes to transform it into a display box is removing the top part along the perforated lines and the single-serving contents are visible.
Pili Hunters also chose a convertible box type for their Pili nut butter blend. Tearing along the perforated lines creates a display box and the treats are ready to be purchased or served easily.
Chocolate display boxes are designed in such a way that after they’re folded, the visible folds present the most important information and entice the viewer.
That’s the good news: when you order a custom box, you can choose where every fold, cutout and perforation come, to create the box that fits your product perfectly.
Next, on the right we have a display box for Vital Leaf that houses multiple chocolates. The chocolate bars are bigger than one-serving bars, and are individually-packed into chocolate bar boxes.
Branson’s Chocolates needed a more sturdy chocolate display box for their bars, so the 19.2 white paperboard was a great choice. The display boxes are custom cut to fit their logo nicely and coated with gloss laminate for a shiny look.
Confectionery boxes and bands
Just in case you were wondering how we can help you present your smaller sweet confections to the world, rest assured: we’ve got your covered! Let’s see what chocolate packaging solutions we can offer for your chocolate candy.
Chocolate box sleeves and bands
Packaging sleeves are one of the most affordable and practical packaging solutions for chocolate candy boxes, and not only. If you already have your chocolate candy boxes and want to customize them with little costs, slide on a custom box sleeve on which you can print anything, and you’re ready to go.
Chocolate box sleeves can be customized just like any other box: you can add cutouts, foil stamping, laminates – whatever your creativity brings to the surface.
If you already have an idea about how to use a sleeve for your chocolate box, get on a call with us or request a quote so we can print it for you!
GET YOUR CHOCOLATE BOX SLEEVES
Two-piece candy boxes
Ideal for chocolate candies, chocolate truffles, or toffees, a two piece box has a base (tray) and a lid that you can customize separately. Because the lid comes over the tray, you’ll be having a double wall candy box that’s super strong.
All the customization options are available for the two-piece candy boxes.
1-piece chocolate boxes
Also known as tuck-top boxes, these ones are also a great idea if you’re in need for a chocolate candy box. 1-piece chocolate boxes have the top panel that opens to allow easy access, then tucks into the top of the box for closing. It also has double walls.
Read more about our labeling solutions for foods and edibles:
Order your custom chocolate packaging from professionals
You’ve seen how many options you can find at YourBoxSolution for your chocolate packaging. No matter your need, we’d love to be part of your journey.
Which of the packaging did you find most interesting? Give us a quick call at (877) 300-2405 if you’d like to share some ideas with us and we’ll help you bring your chocolate box to life.
We’re real people, on location, and offering custom printed boxes and quality packaging solutions at prices you can afford is our mission.
