New Work: Mella's Fudge

This is new packaging I recently designed for Mella's Fudge. Mella is based in West Cork and has been making fudge since she was a child. She now operates from her own kitchen at Lisavaird Co-Op in Clonakilty handmaking delicious, crumbly fudge in four different flavours - vanilla, rum and raisin, walnut and chocolate. The main aim of the brief was to create packaging that reflected that the fudge is handmade but also that it is a high quality, luxury product. This was achieved through the unusual combination of brown Kraft paper with a gold foil detail on the logo. I chose to use only one colour per flavour both to keep the design minimal and also so that each flavour was easily identifiable.

 The wrappers were printed lithographically by the very wonderful Glennon Print in Ashbourne, Co. Meath. As production progressed we encountered a number of difficulties. The first problem was sourcing the Kraft paper, which had to be bought in the UK. Many paper suppliers in Ireland are unfortunately not stocking any of the more unusual stocks at the moment (I never even realised Kraft was quite so unusual!).

 The Kraft paper is still visible beneath the ink.

The next issue was predicting how the colours would take to the brown paper. After running some tests with Kraft paper and my trusty office inkjet printer, I knew the colours would definitely be altered by the brown paper showing through, and I wanted this effect to happen, but it was impossible to know exactly how much they would change once on press. So we switched from the original spot Pantone to process colour. This meant that if the first few came off the press and the colours were wrong it would be easier to adjust the CMYK values on press. If the inks had been spot Pantone colours and had looked wrong the whole job would have had to stop and new Pantone inks ordered.

 Barcode with white background.

Our biggest problem was the barcode on the back of each wrapper. I did some tests in local shops and found that certain types of scanners couldn't read the barcode against the Kraft as the contrast between the black barcode and the brown paper wasn't strong enough. This was resolved by overprinting a white background rectangle, which meant the job had to go on press again - so first to run the process colours, then for the spot white and barcode. I was worried about how this would look, whether the white would be glaringly obvious and overpower the muted colour scheme. However it actually turned out great, the white was quite subtle and I don't think it detracts from it at all.

Before we finally went to print, Glennon's ran lots of tests. This meant that when I arrived for the press check everything was ready to go and the first batch of wrappers were almost colour perfect. We made minor adjustments to the cyan and magenta on the rum and raisin (purple) and walnut (orange) wrappers. This was my first press check, it was really interesting to see how the all the different machines worked, from making the plates to adjusting the inks and beyond!

Final wrappers with gold foil detail.

So that was it! A fews days later the brand new wrappers arrived in Clonakilty to the waiting fudge bars. Last night they made their first public appearance (even if it was only a few seconds) on the Apprentice on TV3. I'm really happy with how they turned out. It was great to get the opportunity to work on something unusual and I'm so glad Mella was keen to go with this. Thanks to Glennon Print for all their work!

If you'd like to buy some fudge (you know you want to) the bars are available in Sheridan's Cheesemongers and Fallon & Byrne amongst others, the full list of stockists is available on Mella's website. The next big events Mella will be attending are the Ballymaloe Craft Fair this weekend November 20th and 21st and the RDS Craft Fair from 1st - 5th December.