Herb & Spice System: Clickable, Stackable Pots

The new range of handy pots are designed to stack together to store neatly in the fridge door and keep fresh for 4 weeks once opened. Perfect for everyday cooking, they cleverly click open for a herb garden at your fingertips. The lid fits perfectly onto the pot, using materials that allow for ease of opening and secure closing, avoiding spills. Tamper evidence is provided via a foil seal, which also aids in protecting the product and maximising shelf life prior to purchase. The stackability of the pots allows easy transfer between the fridge and the bench, with single hand movement.

Gourmet Garden conducted over 5 years of consumer research globally in the form of desk research, surveys, focus groups, interviews, video observations & home-user tests. This research uncovered a gap in the market between fresh herbs that don't last & dried herbs with diminished flavour. Consumer research also discovered a latent unmet consumer need for an organised fridge storage system for herbs and spices. Gourmet Garden's system provides an alternative to this fresh herb wastage, without compromising on colour & flavour as with traditional dried herbs. Combining this world-first technology with an innovative storage solution means that herbs are always on hand, lasting for weeks once opened.

The amount of product contained in each bowl was specifically selected for each herb, and validated using home usage consumer testing. The stackable design required exceptional detail with respect to the sizing of the tooling molds - not only did the lid need to be the perfect fit for the bowl, but the two complete pot units needed to click into each other with the correct force, such that the pots could be easily separated in use without the lids coming off and the contents spilling. Numerous and significant obstacles were overcome in achieving the functional packaging requirements for this stackable pot solution.

The bowl-shaped pots portray the culinary aspects of celebrity chefs prepping ingredients into ready-to-add bowls i.e. Mise en place The size of the pot is perfect for resting snugly into the palm of your hand. The concave interior of the pot allows for easy dispensing with a spoon, or pinching and sprinkling the herb straight from the pot onto your meal. The Lightly Dried range (which includes basil, chilli, coriander, ginger and parsley) come in convenient stackable, clickable pots with flavour-matched, colour-coded name tabs allowing busy cooks to find the right herb easily and sprinkle straight from the pot with their fingers, which is all part of the chef-like experience.

Materials were selected based on their functional barrier properties, as well as compatibility with the stackable design of the pot & lid. Polypropylene was selected due to its ability to be molded into the desired shape, its flexibility and durability in use as well as in recycling after use, and its ability to protect the herbs from degradation during distribution and storage. The added sleeve allows brand identification, product labeling as well as providing a critical element of additional protection for the herbs during distribution. There is messaging and a perforation on the sleeve encouraging consumers to remove the film to reuse or recycle the clear pots.

A lot of consideration was put in to the presentation of the pots on shelf and how the consumer could see first hand that the pots clicked in to one another. Gourmet Garden and Tacca co-designed a tray which blended in with our current shelf display and allowed the bottom pot to click into the tray base just enough, whilst ensuring the whole tray did not lift out when a consumer picked up a pot.