Award-winning snack food producer, Fruit d’Or, packages their dried cranberry snack pouches into corrugated cases that serve as both shipping containers and retail ready display trays, eliminating the extra brown box shipper and reducing packaging by 59%.
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While the term superfood may have lost some of its mystical aura and allure in recent years due to rampant overuse, one thing that hasn’t changed is the virtually unanimous consensus among leading dietitians and nutritionists about wildberries being the best and tastiest source of fiber, natural sugar, antioxidants and many other kinds of disease-fighting nutrients essential to healthy eating and living.
As a major grower and producer of organic wild cranberries and blueberries, Villeroy, Quebec-based Fruit d’Or takes a lot of pride in its self-styled mission to provide Canadian consumers with all the significant health, nutritional and environmental benefits offered by its surprisingly diverse product range.
Founded in 1995 by Martin Le Moine, the company was one of the first in North America to make a switch to organic farming techniques—perfecting the art of fighting insects and weeds by natural means.
In addition to sparing the soil and the product from presence of toxic pesticides and chemicals such as chlorothalonil, lazoxystrobin, acephate, chlorpyrifos and methamidophos, among others, organically-grown cranberries and blueberries are said to contain up to 30 per cent more antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients than their conventionally-grown counterparts.
After overcoming some early growing pains and general market apathy about organic produce at the time, the company leveraged its knack for innovation to develop an extensive portfolio of nutrition and other products utilizing its berries as prime ingredients—making steady market inroads into the ingredients, retail, private-label and nutraceutical co-packing segments.
Sourcing its berries from its own boglands and about 45 family-owned farms across the province of Quebec, the vertically-integrated operation nowadays ranks as the world’s largest grower of organic cranberries and a second-largest organic blueberry processor—with export markets in more than 50 countries worldwide.
Operating three production facilities across Quebec with a total area of more than 550,000 square feet—along with another processing operation in Carver, Ma., acquired in 2021—the company produces a diverse range of products in a variety of formats including dried fruits, concentrates, powders, juice, purées, frozen fruits, seeds and seed extras.
Boasting a varied customer base comprising distributors, repackers, manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, the company’s berries are widely used across a growing range of everyday foods that include cereals and nutrition bars, dairy products and beverages, baked goods and snacks, jams and sauces, cosmetics, and nutraceutical beverages, among others.
To gain greater visibility and prominence in the retail sector, in 2015 Fruit d’Or launched the Patience SourCran line of dried cranberries, packed in snack-sized, single-serve pouches filled with select, slow-grown dried cranberries flavored with peach, raspberry, cherry, strawberry or watermelon extracts.
Made with simple nutritious ingredients without any complicated ingredients or synthetic additives, the tangy high-fiber berries offer an exceptionally healthy and snacking option with only eight grams of sugar per pouch.
Instead of adding sugar, the slow-dried berries are thinly sprinkled with natural flavors and citric acid to transform them into sour candy-like treats.
All the cranberries used in the SourCran brand pouches are fully grown and then gently dried to the perfect point, according to the company, so that they retain as much of their flavor and nutrition as possible.
“It’s all about making cranberries cool,” says Fruit d’Or’s vice-president of marketing and innovation Caroline Miron, describing the brand as a novel and inspired “snackertainment” product.
It's all about making cranberries cool.
“We wanted to rejuvenate our target audience,” Miron explains, “and so we decided to go on a platform that we call ‘snackertaining,’ whereby the product is intended for both snacking and entertainment.
“As such, it is really targeted at younger consumers by inspiring them to choose a healthier option to mainstream sour candies,” she says.
“When you look at what the younger consumers are looking for in a snack, being healthy and shelf-stable often top the list,” Miron says, citing the SourCran candies’ impressive two-year shelf life.
With the SourCran pouches being adorned with luscious gouache-painted graphics matching the colors with their respective flavors, the brand has steadily built up a loyal following among Canadian and U.S. consumers over the last couple of years, culminating in winning the high-profile 2024 Grand Prix Best New Product Award of the Retail Council of Canada (RCC) in the Sweet Snacks category this past spring.
“We were very thankful and excited to receive this award,” says Miron, crediting much of the brand’s breakthrough mass appeal to the distinct Cabrio Case® retail-ready packaging developed by the Minneapolis, Minn.-based secondary packaging equipment manufacturer Delkor Systems.
Originally invented by Delkor’s vice-president of engineering Rick Gessler about eight years ago, the Cabrio Case was invented specifically to facilitate upright shelf packaging for bags and stand-up pouches of cheese products as an alternative to the traditional peg-hole displays—requiring a fair bit of manual stocking by the retailers’ staff and unnecessary reaching and product handling by the shoppers.
Nowadays widely used for a broad range of single-serve and other smaller-sized food products retailed in stand-up pouches and other flexible packaging formats, the Cabrio Case features a perfectly pre-cut tray front to provide perfect presentation for the product inside the case, standing up or laid-down flat, with its wrapped tray corners and machine-cut front edges and sides facilitating a clean and tidy look for the entire shelf.
Made from a single corrugated blank for optimal material usage and die-cutting precision, the patented tray-hood Cabrio Case is easy to open on the shelf with a single swift motion with no cutting required and, moreover, it eliminates the need for using standard corrugated shipping carriers and boxes to ship the products to customers—resulting in significant savings in packaging materials.
“By using the Cabrio Case as shelf-ready display and as a transportation box all at once, we were able to achieve a 59-percent reduction in the amount of packaging materials used for the distribution of the SourCran brand products to our retail customers,” says Miron.
We were able to achieve a 59% reduction in the amount of packaging materials used.
“It basically eliminated the use of the ‘brown box’ containers for this product range,” Miron says, “while providing an opportunity for extra brand messaging and shelf impact on the exterior panels of the Cabrio Case.
“It’s been a great tool for us since we began using it just over a year ago,” says Miron, “and we were very proud to relaunch our product in this innovative packaging with Delkor’s help.
“In fact, this was one of the most successful product launches we ever had as a company,” says Miron, citing a double-digit increase in sales for the SourCran brand since the packaging switchover.
As Delkor Systems sales manager Matt Meidl relates, Fruit d’Or first expressed serious interest in Cabrio Case packaging two years ago while attending the biennial PACK EXPO International packaging exhibition in Chicago.
“It turned out that the [packaging] line we brought to the show was exactly what they were looking for,” Meidl recalls. “Specifically, the system has fast changeovers and the flexibility to run all the package formats at the speeds they needed: a large Club Store tray format, a retail-ready Cabrio Case, and a ‘brown box’ shipper.
“As Delkor’s case designs are formed from flat blanks, our customers are also able to significantly reduce their packaging material usage,” Meidl points out. “Our customers typically save around $100,000 annually in corrugated for every new line install.”
Installed at the Plessisville plant in May of 2023, the new retail-ready packaging line is comprised of three fully integrated Delkor secondary packaging machines, including:
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