Angelica Cortez

Design for Good: Packaging Design

This packaging design was created for a Design for Good project that focuses on humanitarian initiatives and helpful designs that make a positive impact on people's lives. Ying Zhong, Aldora Lau and I created Keelio, a preportioned frozen vegetable brand that helps reduce food waste and aims to give back to communities in need. We created a brand and package design to help address problems such as the highly processed nutrient-poor food items that are made cheap and widely available, Canadians not getting enough potassium, the 2.2 million tonnes of food waste each year in Canada and more. Keelio seeks to help solve these problems with a package design that leads to less food waste, has low environmental impacts, contains potassium rich vegetables, accounts for those with dietary restrictions and gives back to communities in need. Our final package design encourages our target consumers to consider their food consumption practices with this frozen healthy food portioned product that reduces food waste. Sustainable materials are used to create every part of this package as Keelio not only promotes and encourages sustainability through less food waste but in the consideration of this product's end of life cycle with the substrates being sustainable, biodegradable and encouraged to be reused as planters. The final package is larger in scale than it would be if manufactured (reduced around 15%). For the prototype, the containers are made of paper pulp while the lids and sleeves both use craft paper. The actual packaging will all be biodegradable and will use recyclable substrates. The hypothetical materials for the container include molded fiber, cornstarch, coco foam, etc. And gelatin film will be utilized for the seasoning and sauce. Our design is accessible to a broad demographic and would be part of charities or initiatives to get this product to communities in need. It’s also convenient and easy-to-use with its pre-portioned sections, low cooking/microwave time, easy to rip and peel sections and seasoning packets making the vegetables ready to eat and add to any meal. In addition, it reduces packaging waste by using recyclable materials, reusable materials and second-life materials. Project by: Angelica Cortez, Aldora Lau and Ying Zhong