CPG Development / Product Commercialization

How do you make kale crave-able? The answer to our success was through consumer insights.

$10M+

annual saleS

10+

products developed

How can you make kale crave-able?

Curation Foods (then called Apio) sought to extend its Eat Smart salad kits - via new, innovative products that leveraged existing manufacturing capabilities. 

In 2012, kale was an ultra-healthy trend, yet was still suffering from being outside mainstream consumers’ comfort zones. A new kale product might gain initial trial, but it would have to be crave-able to win in the longer term.

Working in a saturated sector, we had to use consumer and culinary insight to deliver a cut-through product, satisfying critical cost, packaging and time-to-market constraints.

We started by looking into consumers’ desires and needs. 

While taste preferences varied considerably across the US, we saw an unmet need for products that delivered both on progressive health, and on everyday approachability.


Deeper investigation uncovered clues to how that could be achieved through taste, texture and anchoring on the familiar. Once the consumer proposition was defined, we continued to prototype, test and refine the products.

The outcome.

We worked with Curation’s team to balance manufacturing constraints with our goals for nutrition and taste. Creating, testing and refining blends of kale and complementary superfoods like vegetables, textured dry fruits, seeds and nuts, combined with a cravable poppyseed dressing, yielded a perfect balance of cost viability, manufacturing feasibility, and consumer desirability. 

The name, “Sweet Kale Salad” at once communicated the product's nature, and reframed how consumers thought about kale.