Organic food brand Happy Family is the first national brand to offer fully transparent baby food pouches. Happy Family's new Clearly Crafted™ product line showcases “goodness you can see” with clear plastic packaging, recipes listed directly on the pouches (not just the ingredients list), and the USDA-Certified Organic and Non-GMO Project Verified logos.
Organic food brand Happy Family is the first national brand to offer fully transparent baby food pouches. Happy Family's new Clearly Crafted™ product line showcases “goodness you can see” with clear plastic packaging, recipes listed directly on the pouches (not just the ingredients list), and the USDA-Certified Organic and Non-GMO Project Verified logos.
"Parents are looking for openness and honesty from the companies they buy products from, especially for their baby," Happy Family CEO and Founder Shazi Visram said. "We developed Clearly Crafted with this in mind.”
The company has been developing the transparent pouches for several years. Brandchannel reported that “other brands have faced problems with various organisms, ranging from mold to maggots, infesting the unseen spaces in their pouches, so consumer demand for completely clear packaging has been building.”
“But more than just the obvious word ‘transparency’ in the packaging is that Clearly Crafted is about transparency in general,” Visram told brandchannel. “That’s the exciting part about it: to provide total and exact clarity to the parent on what they’re getting. Our line has set the bar in the industry for everyone, ideally, to follow.”
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Transparency has indeed been a growing area of concern among consumers, especially when it comes to food. According to a 2014 white paper by Sullivan Higdon & Sink (SHS) FoodThink, entitled “Emerging Faith in Food Production,” 65 percent of consumers want to know more about where their food comes from, only 31 percent feel food companies are transparent about food production practices, and only 34 percent say the agriculture industry is transparent. Companies big and small are taking note: For example, startup Clear Labs is gaining traction by releasing consumer reports on the DNA testing results of various food products, and Campbell Soup has pledged to disclose GMOs on all its product labels within 16 months.
Visram said, “We want to share every aspect of the product story, from the farms where we grow our ingredients to the recipes that we use. Parents can feel confident feeding their children, by knowing and seeing exactly what's inside the pouch.”
The recipes on the pouch add clarity to the ingredients listed by predominance, as required by US regulatory bodies. Parents can now easily get the gist of what is in Happy Family’s baby food at a glance; half an apple, a quarter of a guava, and 3 teaspoons of cubed beet are made into organic purees for each Clearly Crafted Apples, Guava & Beets pouch, for example.
Information on Happy Family suppliers is provided through the company’s website and HappyFarms.com, so that customers can learn about each “farm-to-pouch” story. Happy Family reports that they work with their farm partners to implement “Good Agricultural Practices” including land assessments, good hygiene practices, and traceability practices, among others. The company says that these quality standards “go beyond USDA Organic certification,” and claims to regularly audit its suppliers to ensure the standards are met.
The product line includes 12 varieties of organic fruit and vegetable purees for babies 4 months and older, and will be available through Amazon, Babies R Us, Diapers.com, Target and Whole Foods, among other national and regional retailers, for $1.79.
Update April 1, 2015: In an e-mail to Sustainable Brands, a HappyFamily spokesperson clarified that: "In terms of disposal, the pouches themselves are not recyclable at the moment. However, the caps are 100% recyclable. We are working towards to manufacturing a completely sustainable and recyclable package and plan to launch one within the next few years."
Published Mar 9, 2016 11am EST / 8am PST / 4pm GMT / 5pm CET