"Wow, these packages are so beautiful I'm never going to throw them away. I'll save them all and decorate my house with them!"

"I love it — it really captures the spirit of Luna & Larry's
Coconut Bliss!"

"Who cares, I don't eat the package!"

"But I LOVE the old package! Why did they have to mess with it? I miss Ganesh!"

"Luna and Larry must have sold out — they all do eventually!
What a cruel betrayal!"

 "I'm going back to Ben & Jerry's!"

If you've been a happy and devoted lover of Luna & Larry's Coconut Bliss, we imagine your reaction to our new package might fall somewhere along the scale illustrated above. We have been warned that changing a package design can be a very perilous undertaking, and that we run the risk of alienating loyal customers.

So we'd like to start out by reassuring you that we haven't sold out to Unilever or Nestlé or some greedy Wall Street venture capital firm. Our company is still owned by us along with a few of our friends, employees, and family members. Nor have we changed how we make Luna & Larry's Coconut Bliss (except that we are now very happy to be using several certified fair trade ingredients: cocoa, chocolate, vanilla extract, and coffee).

If you love our new package, that's probably all you need to know, and you need not bother reading any further.

If you're still dubious, though, here's the full story of our new package (this will be long, so you may want to scoop yourself a bowl of Bliss and settle in).

The Background

You may have noticed that while most ice creams have preprinted packaging, Luna & Larry's Coconut Bliss has always had hand-applied labels on each container. (This is why, occasionally, you may have found a crooked one.) In our early days, when we were making only a couple hundred pints per week, this was quite manageable. We designed the labels ourselves and printed them on a little Epson inkjet printer in our bedroom, and we put them on the empty containers while the Bliss was churning away in the ice cream machine.

Our kitty, Sasha, loved to watch the printer when it was under our loft bed

At first there were only two labels—on the front and on the lid—but when we started getting into larger stores we needed to add bar codes, so a third label was added to the back. As we grew, we moved our Epson into our production room, then into an office, and the quantities grew to 2,500 pints per week. At this point, our printer was chugging away non-stop, and we had a crew of high school students labeling on evenings and weekends.

Luna at Lochmead

By spring of 2007, it was clear that we were outgrowing our production facility and that we were ready to start working on pre-printed containers. This had not  really been an option for us before, as the minimum print run for pre-printed containers is 25,000 of each flavor! But we knew that we had to take the leap, and we began working with a design firm in Portland to create a new design that would embody the essence of what Luna & Larry's Coconut Bliss means to us.

In the meantime, we were growing rapidly, so we moved our production to Lochmead Dairy in nearby Junction City, which has had nearly 20 years of experience making organic, nondairy ice creams, and we expanded our distribution into 7 northwestern states. Since we were going to be making 40,000 pints in a week, rather than 2,500, we were clearly exceeding the capacity of our noble little printer, so we had slightly bigger and shinier labels printed for us by a printing company here in Oregon. We also added a nutrition facts label, and it took a team of 10-12 people working full time to get all the containers labeled.

The Design Process

While we loved our old labels with Ganesh, we are creative people who thrive on opportunities to grow and evolve, and we took this as an opportunity to re-imagine our visual representation of Luna & Larry's Coconut Bliss. We wanted to go into this process without any preconceptions, and to be truly open to discovering a look that would capture the essence of what is most meaningful to us about Luna & Larry's Coconut Bliss. We also saw this as an opportunity to bring in the vision and skills of other designers—like a screenwriter turning a script over to a director. We started by meeting with the design firm's creative team and discussing in depth all the qualities that we wanted our new design to embody: quirky, artisanal, innovative, spiritual, sensual, pure, simple, real, fun, high quality. We spent hours roaming the aisles of supermarkets, looking at packages and discussing the qualities that we liked and disliked. We thought about what were the most important things to communicate, and what words should be on the package.

A few weeks after our initial meeting, the design team called us into their office and showed us "round one": six totally distinct design concepts, all radically different from our old design. We were stunned into speechlessness. Up until this point we had been directly involved in everything related to Luna & Larry's Coconut Bliss ourselves, from developing the recipes, to designing the original label, to making and delivering it. It was a very strange and surreal experience to see someone else's interpretation of our creation.

Designing the new packages ended up being a much longer process than we ever imagined, with many rounds of revisions over many months, and it was alternately exhilarating and excruciating. It wasn't until we found a Portland artist, Lydia Hess, who was able to give the design the artist's hand that we were seeking, that we finally felt satisfied.

What Happened to Ganesh?

We have always loved Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu deity who is known as "the remover of obstacles," and we have always had statues and batiks of Ganesh in our house and in our office. When we were creating our very first label, we were struggling with the design when Luna suggested that we put Ganesh on it. In India it is customary to invoke Ganesh at the beginning of any new enterprise to ensure an auspicious beginning. Excited, I found a Ganesh image on the internet, gave him a silver spoon, an ice cream cone and a coconut, put him in the middle of the label, and the design quickly fell into place. And like magic, doors seemed to open for us and very quickly our business was thriving. Ganesh also seemed appropriate because of his legendary love of sweets, and because we envisioned people eating Luna & Larry's Coconut Bliss as a way of heightening their consciousness through sensual experience, and we felt that Ganesh embodied this, too.

But over time we started to feel that perhaps Ganesh had fulfilled his purpose and it was time to create our own, unique imagery. We also began to feel that we'd rather not use another culture's religious imagery in this way. In recognition of Ganesh, we still include an elephant head on our package.

How come I never saw guar gum on the label before?

Our organic coconut milk supplier in Thailand has always included a tiny amount of guar gum, a natural emulsifier made from the ground seeds of the fiber-rich Indian guar plant, to help prevent the coconut oil from separating out of the milk. Guar gum also has other beneficial properties. We are not required to break down the constituents of coconut milk on our ingredient listing, but because we feel it is important to give people as much information as possible, we have chosen to list it on our new package.

We are very excited and happy about our new package design and hope that you will enjoy it, too.

Blissfully yours,
Luna & Larry