Chocolate Packaging – Too Beautiful to Open

by Caroline Mays

One day, you see a delightful yellow, orange, mint, and pink book with charming illustrations of a young woman bicycling past a quaint three-story building. Inside the book, a bevy of brightly-painted bonbons smile up at you. The book is not from an art installation, but from Stick With Me Sweets in the Nolita neighborhood of New York City.

Another day, you see a rainbow palate of fonts, psychedelic colors and whimsical illustrations squeezed onto the newly-rebranded Maeve chocolate bars from Seattle. These wrappers, reminiscent of 1970s band albums, combine mustard yellow with turquoise and orange for the “Kettle Chip” bar, while the busy fuchsia-and-Kelly green wrapper of “Magical Mint” features a young, flower-crowned woman surrounded by mint leaves while hugging a frog, a squirrel and a duck.

Meanwhile, Icelandic Omnom bars feature striking geometric animal illustrations that evoke origami shapes against backgrounds of tangerine, dusty rose, lemon yellow, red hearts and rainbow stripes. Swans, octopi, bats, bulls, alligators and unicorns mirror each other horizontally, across the brown, blue, and yellow Omnom wolf logo.

You could be touring your way through the country’s art galleries, but you’re actually looking at shelves full of chocolate boxes.

Chocolates have arrived wrapped in works of art, as well as in plain sleeves, for over a century. In the 1800s, when the food mostly arrived in cardboard and tins, whimsical art nouveau illustrations by Alphonse Mucha often graced the lids.

But over time, Mucha’s works gave way to boxes and wrappers that were drab, unimaginative afterthoughts, sometimes distinguished only by a single color and font selection. That has changed and the change is still evolving. In the last few years, chocolate-lovers have seen another renaissance of colorful, artistic, eye-catching packaging.

Renowned chocolatier Jacques Torres says that stunning packaging is one of the main reasons why chocolate is considered a “luxury item.” He explains that his customers told him that they preferred to buy chocolates on special occasions. “That’s when I realized I’m not just a chocolate maker; I am also part of that process of gifting,” Torres says. “If you’re going to give a gift to someone, you’re going to wrap it; you want to make it look beautiful. If you buy a special box of chocolate for someone, you want that box to wow them from outside to inside.”

Gerald Palacios, CEO of Salon du Chocolat, agrees. “When you want to reflect luxury, you know the packaging is vital,” Palacios says, reminiscing about a “stunning” matcha tablet that he once bought at Aoki, in Japan.

Torres, who has sold chocolates in elegant brown-and-orange boxes for many years, recently debuted a series of chocolate bars with multicolored urban illustrations of New York City, where he still operates stores. He thinks the shifts in packaging are part of the larger cycles of design. “I think expectations have changed,” he says. “Look, if you see a movie that was shot 50 years ago and a movie that’s shot today, everything has changed. The cars changed. The haircuts changed. The shape of the pants changed. Clothing, colors, everything is new. Chocolate is no different.”

A senior art director at Young Jerks branding and packaging studio, Brett Stenson agrees that some of the design tides are turning. Stenson believes that “people are seeking, in packaging, to offset . . . the minimalist, clean, bold design that seems to be pretty prevalent everywhere.” Stenson recently worked on redesigning the packaging for Maeve, formerly called Seattle Chocolate. Stenson says that “the trends will always move to be the opposite of what’s going on, and I think a lot of people are allowing themselves to be more playful.”

Susanna Yoon, the founder of Stick With Me Sweets, says that her colorful book-like packaging tends to “gravitate toward whimsical, bright, fun designs that instantly feel happy.” Yoon believes that more classic or elegant designs would “not always spark the same emotional response.” For Yoon, “It is never just about the chocolate. It is about how it makes someone feel,” and at Stick With Me, her “goal is to evoke joy.”

Some distributors have noticed the difference. Matt Caputo, the CEO of A Priori Specialty Food in Salt Lake City, says that “craft chocolate makers, at least in the niche I focus on, are definitely starting to understand the value of packaging and its outsized role. . . in the success and longevity of a brand.” He explains that if brands “don’t go full-blown rebrand route,” they are often enhancing their packaging with “richer materials,” or “cool little elements” such as metal foil embossing.

Of his own chocolate, Torres says, “We spend at least as much money in packaging as in making the chocolates. It’s crazy, but packing is really a big piece of what we do, because we are in the gifting business.”

Some of these design decisions have definitely had an impact on sales. Caputo says that Rózsavölgyi Csokoládé, from Budapest, Hungary, has recently moved from a “classic Eastern European” design, which he describes as “cool and elegant,” to “fun and whimsical” illustrations of “little cacao bean characters,” drawn by the chocolatier’s wife. Rózsavölgyi Csokoládé’s Almond Gianduja bar portrays a cacao pod enjoying a picnic with an almond, against a background of blooming red trees and purple hills. The packaging for one of their more creative flavors, Bread and Olives, shows a cacao pod in a straw hat, plein-air painting on a cliff above the sea. Except he’s painting a baguette.

Of Rózsavölgyi Csokoládé’s redesign, Caputo says that “the impact on their sales have been profound.” He’s noticed a difference in the sales of other chocolate bars whose packaging has been redesigned, as well: “Any of the bars that have switched over. . . have more than doubled in sales,” he adds.

Other brands, such as Omnom and Compartes, pioneered wacky, wonderful, colorful packaging and have stuck with the same designs for ten years or more. One of Compartes’ most bodacious bars features bursts of bright green palm trees against a hot pink background. Chocolatier Jonathan Grahm told Iconic Life that the design was “inspired by the pink and green palm frond wallpaper at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” Called “California Love,” after Tupac Shakur’s ode to the state, the bar is made of dark chocolate and pretzels.

Still, at least distributor downplays the impact of better packaging, insisting that the quality of the chocolate is what matters most to consumers. Pepi Di Giacomo, owner of the Cocoa Store in New York, explains that the shop’s location makes it impossible to rely on walk-ins. Because the shop is located on the sixth floor of a building, Di Giacomo says, “It’s a little bit of a maze, a treasure hunt, so once customers come up here, they are probably already looking for something specific.” Chocolate aficionados on the hunt for a bar they already like aren’t going to be as impressionable as someone perusing the shelves for something new. “Packaging might help for the first sale. It has nothing to do with the next sales,” Di Giacomo said, because a customer won’t keep buying a bar in an appealing package if they don’t enjoy the taste of the chocolate inside.

Other brands take an intentionally informative or educational approach. Rob Delany, Director of Business Operations for World Wide Chocolate, a premium chocolate distributor, says that other brands’ packaging focuses on the details of the bar inside. According to Delany, many bean-to-bar chocolate brands use the interior packaging to “speak more about that cocoa bean origin, flavor notes, some history about that region of the world where it’s grown and what it takes to farm those beans.”

Stenson explains that designing the packaging for Maeve chocolate involved “a few rounds of deep conceptual thinking.” They landed on the idea that “Maeve” is a goddess of a “fantastical realm,” and that the wrappers would illustrate that world and its characters, themes and locations. Stenson and his team aimed to create wrapping that felt “dynamic” and “not overly templatized.” He describes the final product as feeling “optimistic,” “maximalist,” appealing to kids—and something that would allow adults to “be a kid for a second.”

Manoa, of Hawaii, has also shifted to more colorful illustrations. Many of Manoa’s original packages were decorated with antique-looking, pen-and-ink sketches of Hawaiian landscapes with metallic accents. But recently, they’ve released a set of bars illustrated by Shar Tui’asoa of Punky Aloha Studio. Tui’asoa’s new designs portray young women enjoying the tropics – surfing a wave on the “Pa’akai Sea Salt Dark Chocolate” bar, pedaling under the sun on the “Banana & Nibs” bar,” and enjoying a steaming cuppa at sunrise on the “Kope x Coffee” bar.

In another 100 years, perhaps Stenson’s and Tui’asoa’s illustrations will be featured in museum art books, right next to Mucha’s.

Photos by Caroline Mays

(This article appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)