Conducting in-field research into the local chocolate industry, our team found that chocolatiers, particularly those in the artisan or bean-to-bar chocolate industry, highly valued their packaging, using their packages to exude the concept of travel and luxury. This consideration causes issues in the design of labels—important for companies to follow health regulations and to further emphasize the sense of extravagance—and the modularity of the chocolates themselves. As most chocolate packaging designs are limited to the rectangular shape of the chocolate models themselves, we became interested in developing a form of chocolate packaging that could distinguish itself from competitors, exude a sense of luxury, and still tackle problems in labeling and modularity. 

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We decided to design chocolates in the shape of test tubes, allowing the different chocolate pieces and flavors to be pre-separated (thus improving the modularity of the chocolate and its packaging) while maintaining a sense of novelty and thus luxury. Each piece of chocolate has a label, which reveals the flavor, the batch number, and the country of origin—thus replicating the sense of luxury and travel found in other brands' chocolate packaging. A box is designed to create the impression of extravagance found in cigar cases; the box's label also includes the year in which the beans were harvested, another detail that heightens the sense of luxury from the box of chocolates.

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Experience design by Larry Guo, Ha D.H. Le, and Rajan Trivedi. Prototype box by Ha D.H. Le. Prototype chocolate by Larry Guo & Rajan Trivedi. Prototype labels by Larry Guo.