Protein bars are everywhere. Once a niche item at health food shops and sports supplement stores, they've muscled their way into mainstream supermarkets and stores, and they now come in all kinds of formats and flavours.
With competition now so intense, the unusual packaging design adopted by Jacked Granny (yes, that's really the brand's name) might be seen as purely an attempt to stand out on the shelves. But it turns out that there's a practical reason why it's putting its products in sardine tins (also see our round up of packaging design inspiration).
Jacked Granny's pull-tab metal tins enable it stick to its objective of using simple ingredients and few of them (it's tagline is "The Simplest Protein Bar ever"). The tins hermetically seal the bars therein to prevent them from entering into contact with the air or moisture.
That allows the company to achieve acceptable shelf life for the products without adding preservatives: the made-in-the-US bars have just four ingredients (peanut flour, egg white, maple syrup and either dried raspberries or cocoa powder). Flexible paper something that would be difficult with traditional plastic wraps.
The design might seem to present a certain irony: fewer ingredients but more packaging. But the packaging isn't just superfluous bulk, it actually solves a practical problem. And while a tin might seem like an excessive amount of material use, the material tends to be easier to recycle.
