The redesign came after the company discovered through consumer testing that most shoppers didn’t actually know its name. Rather, many found the brand by looking for the bright red badge that encircled the company’s name and was positioned in the upper left corner of the box.
“We never realized until we did a consumer that, first of all, consumers don’t know our name … they call us Mary’s and [presumed] we make ‘gone crackers,’” or “even weirder, they call us Mary’s Gone” and think we make crackers, explained Cate Baston Baril, the company’s marketing director.
To help clarify the branding, Mary’s Gone Crackers now proudly displays its humorous name across the entire top third of the box.
“We decided we would make the name of the company a little more clear because there is a lot of humor in it,” Baril said, explaining that the company founder Mary “had been a psycho therapist and it is literally crazy to take a good job like that and throw it over to become a food entrepreneur. We wanted that humor to stay with us.”
In addition to enlarging the name, the new packaging has a brighter white background that pops more on shelf than the previous package, which was mostly an off-white color.
The brand also took the opportunity to call out some of the nutritional and environmental benefits of the brand that were always true, but which consumers either were not as focused on before or which were potentially getting lost among other information on the box.
For example, the brand now calls out the amount of plant-based protein in each serving, which for a the Super Seed crackers is 5 grams – an amount that the US Department of Agriculture considers a “good source,” Baril said.
To share the company’s environmental impact, the company opted to include on the back of the box an illustration of the rice fields in California where it sources some of its ingredients. The flooded fields are filled with migratory water birds that move through the area during the off cycle and contribute to the organic farming cycle, Baril said.
She added, the illustration, along with the other changes, help people better understand “when they buy Mary’s Gone Crackers, they are really buying something special.”
A new, larger facility
While undertaking rebranding of this magnitude can be a handful, it is not the only thing that Mary’s Gone Crackers has focused on during the past two years. It also has been busy opening a bigger bakery so that it can meet higher demand for its crackers.
Baril explained that two years ago, Mary’s Gone Crackers moved from California to Reno, Nev., to create a larger bakery. And while the company struggled initially with adjusting its recipes and baking times to account for the altitude and dry atmosphere of its new home compared to where it previously operated in California, the brand now has “really consistent baking and our capacity is much larger,” so that is better situated for future growth, Baril said.
