Brand: MadeGood
Category: Granola Bars
Parent brand: Riverside Natural Foods
Agency: Unknown
Welcome to our Redesign of the Month series—where we spotlight one deserving brand harnessing the power of design to make an impact, tell a story, and outshine its previous packaging. Hundreds of current category consumers evaluate the old and new designs across a wide range of performance areas, including purchase preference, communication, mental availability, and design element resonance. Notably, Designalytics’ testing outcomes align with actual sales performance more than 90% of the time.
Congratulations to this month’s honoree: MadeGood granola bars.
When buying snacks for their kids, many parents face the same dilemma: finding something tasty enough to please them, yet nutritious enough to feel good about. The Fotovat family—Nima and his sisters Salma and Sahba—faced this exact challenge with their own children. To make matters more difficult, their kids attended allergy-aware schools with strict allergen limits, which curtailed their snacking options.
Like so many entrepreneurs before them, the trio—along with Nima’s wife, Ladan—decided to create a solution themselves: MadeGood Foods, a company devoted to crafting better-for-you, allergy-aware snacks.
The brand has seen remarkable growth since it was founded in 2013—but so has the competition within the category. The brand’s recent redesign will certainly help, as it performed extremely well in Designalytics’ consumer testing, indicating a high likelihood of sales growth.
An inversion of the original color scheme makes it immediately clear that this is a new design direction. The flavor-color now dominates, rather than complements, each package’s palette. On the chocolate chip variety pictured above, brown is the primary hue (aligning with category cues), and this color strategy is consistent across the portfolio of MadeGood granola bar flavors.
The language to describe the bars was also changed. Rather than simply calling them “granola bars,” the brand added the descriptors “organic” (important to many category consumers) and “chewy.” It’s also in a larger, all-caps, sans-serif font, giving it more prominence and making it more legible.
The hero of the pack—the bar itself—is pictured whole on the updated version, rather than with ingredients crumbling from the left side (as it was with the old design). The dual-tone backdrop in the new look also subtly supports the appetite imagery in conveying flavor.
The bottom right cluster of badges has been reduced to one: the familiar, but now larger, “USDA Organic.” The “nut-free” callout has been elevated to a space alongside the image of the bar, and has been paired with a gluten-free message.
This redesign was a clear winner: 74% of consumers preferred to purchase the new design over the old.
Inverting the color scheme was a clever way to improve the design while remaining recognizable to loyal fans. The brand leaned into flavor-based color cues, which served to create better contrast as well as making the pack more eye-catching.
For example: In the case of the chocolate chip variety, the design’s dominant color (brown in this example) not only aids in flavor navigation, but supports the imagery in creating appetite appeal. Consumers said of the new design that the color “makes it look more chocolatey and flavorful,” and “the dark brown makes you crave chocolate more.” It also increases legibility, with one consumer noting that “it makes it easier to read the text on the box.”
As with most of our Redesign of the Month honorees, the new look also dominated the former design in communicating key product attributes. In fact, it outperformed its predecessor in communicating each of the top 12 most important purchase drivers to consumers, and by an average of 36 points. Given that communication has an 88% correlation with in-market performance, this is great news for the brand.
Designalytics’ Redesign Response Report (part of our syndicated design research offering) for this packaging highlights an intriguing difference in the element engagement. The number-one most engaging design element for both designs is the image of the bar itself (no big surprise, as taste imagery is always a star of the show). Consumer response was very positive in both cases.
Where it gets interesting is with the second most engaging element for consumers. For the old design, it was the brand name. This, of course, isn’t a bad thing—but it may suggest that there was less on the pack that consumers wanted to engage with. The brandmark is the largest element on the pack, and thus stands as a likely default.
For the new, on the other hand, consumers engaged much more heavily with the “organic chewy granola bars.” In verbatim responses, they repeatedly called out “organic” and “chewy” as positive elements of the design.
Another communication boon was adding a “nut and gluten free” badge next to the image of the bar. Consumers with allergies, sensitivities, or preferences in this area appreciated how easy it was to spot this information—but it wasn’t just them. Many others noted that they didn’t have an issue with either nuts or gluten, but still liked that the callout was there. “This is important if you know someone with a food allergy,” said one, while another commented “It isn't important to me, but I appreciate they have it clearly labeled for those that need it.”
Wins
Opportunities
““The darker background made it easier to read and made it more visually interesting.”
“I didn't have to try to see if it was gluten free in the ingredients list.”
“The product itself sold [me].”
“I enjoy how much information I'm able to learn.”
Our goal behind highlighting impactful redesigns is to help brands understand market reactions to design changes and make intentional design decisions. We create a full report of these insightful case studies for every brand redesign in our cross-category database. These value-add tools are created automatically for our clients who subscribe to syndicated category data. For more information on this redesign report or others, contact us.