Grappable
Venture Design
Summary
Grappable is a packaging innovation firm dedicated to delivering accessible packaging to the world’s most beloved food brands.
Challenge
For the growing population of people with an injury, disability or other condition - like arthritis- that limits their use of their hands, preparing meals presents a significant daily challenge. Since cooking fresh food can be difficult and even dangerous, people with hand use issues often rely on packaged food. However, the packaging these foods come in are often impossible for someone with reduced hand function to open.
Key insights
People with reduced hand functioning would like to cook for themselves more and rely on expensive take-out or delivery meals less. However, food packaging presents a significant challenge, causing people to abandon brands they used to love. For the food brands, adopting a new package design is a risky, expensive endeavor.
The Solution
Grappable helps consumer packaged food brands adopt more accessible packaging by licensing its world-class packaging designs and material innovations. With a unique licensing model, Grappable shares the risk of innovation with its clients and succeeds alongside them. Grappable is dedicated to helping food brands serve their customers’ changing needs.
Discover
Our initial target user was a teammate’s brother who had suffered a severe spinal cord injury that left him without much strength or dexterity in his hands. We accompanied him to the grocery store and watched him cook to understand what specific activities presented challenges.
Define
Conversations with others with disabilities or injuries that affected the use of their hands highlighted the role of food packaging as the “make or break” factor in their purchasing decisions. No matter how much somebody loves peanut butter, they will stop eating it if it’s too labor-intensive to open and spread.
“This is one of the biggest frustrations of daily life. My grocery buying choices are very much dependent on easy-to-open packaging. ”
Develop
We discarded several ideas in our hunt for a viable business to address this problem in order to focus on one core competency - designing the world’s most accessible food packaging.
We spoke with CEOs, COOs and brand managers of consumer packaged food brands and learned that while packaging can be a key differentiator, adopting new packaging is a high-risk proposition. Licensing one of Grappable’s packaging designs allows food brands to introduce new packaging to their customers at a reduced risk.
Deliver
We help companies unlock new value from existing products by designing accessible packaging that better meets the needs of their customers. Through our licensing model, Grappable is truly differentiated in our ability to do packaging R&D and design faster, leaner, and more efficiently than a traditional design agency or packaging company. By developing a library of intellectual property and licensing it to companies, we gain the stability of recurring revenue streams that many design firms lack.
While many design agencies specialize in developing packaging forms and many manufacturing companies focus on efficient production, Grappable has unique expertise designing for an underserved and growing market of people with limited hand function.
Packaging designs by Yvonne Lin
Team: Cody Boeger, Casey Flaherty, Dane Wetschler, Rachel Wold