The Mott’s for Tots Story: the Mott’s team knew for years that Mom’s dilute juice for their young kids to limit their sugar intake. When they are away from home or on the go, diluting the juice is also inconvenient. It is even more inconvenient if your kids drink from juice boxes. We wanted to gain market share of the single-serve juice category while offering a point-of difference. This difference is 40% less sugar than regular juice products, vitamin fortification and the use of purified water.


Hughes Design Group was again brought in to design the graphics. One of the design challenges was how do we communicate increased water without coming off as ‘too medicinal” looking. After some discussion sessions and focus groups, we came to the conclusion that the isle was full of characters and critters that appeal to kids, but very few brands out there were talking to the Mom’s. We decided to make the outer registered shrink package appealing to Mom and the inner box more appealing to kids with unique fruit characters.


From a packaging perspective this package had several challenges, first it was to be in a tetra box, second the outer wrap was a registered shrink sleeve, third was that we wanted this product to be in the club channel so we also needed a club tray with bright graphics on a preprint corrugate.


Tetra Pack is really a great company to work with once the design was ready. We had a bunch of bright special colors to match, the Mott’s logo had to be consistent across the platform and the fruit characters had to look appealing.


The outer packaging also had challenges as well. The nature of shrink wrap is that the material is thin and somewhat translucent. This meant that we were limited to the number of colors that we could use as we had to do a “double-bump” of white to cover the inner boxes. You also have to be very careful where you communicate elements of the package due to the nature of shrinking around nine boxes. Get it wrong and your UPC will not scan, the ingredients will get covered up or the primary display panel will look wavy. We had to rematch the colors a few times to get them in proper alignment with the juice box color.


The Club Pack: In the past Mott’s had marketed to the club channel in a full box shipper. This box was corrugate preprint which is expensive. To give you a little lesson on corrugate, it is made of three parts, the inside layer, the middle layer or “flute” and the outer layer. The preprint we used was manufactured by printing the outer consumer visible layer (in Canada) and shipping it to New Jersey where it was to be assembled with the other two layers. Because corrugate is large format printing, it must be purchased in minimums and on big rolls the size of your car. If you don’t sell your product in and use up these rolls, you must “eat” the cost and it is expensive. On the plus side, preprint offers great print quality, bright colors and tight traps.


Furthermore, this was to be a “variety pack” and it had to be hand-assembled at a rehabber to include all flavors and the box did not lend itself to 4/9-packs. The decision was made to create a clear-shrink wrapped, direct-print tray that could hold four 9-packs. Because it was direct print corrugate, we created an inexpensive brightly printed insert sheet. The cost of these two elements was less than the cost of the previous box.

64oz Package: Mott’s for Tots was so successful that it was moved into a multi-serve package. The labels were designed to mimic the shrink sleeve with a few of the design elements of the tetra box.  The labels are glue-applied litho printed wet-strength paper. This packaging won the Product of the Year USA Awards 2008

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