Keto-Snaps Branding 1.0

Keto-Snaps Branding 2.0

Keto-Snaps Branding 3.0

As 2020 rolled in, things were looking good for our Keto-Snaps brand but terrible for the world. The COVID-19 pandemic was official and all the health contingencies that came with that began to impact us. It wasn’t long into 2020 that our commissary kitchen at Industry City had to close, and with the loss of our production facility we were unable to take any orders. We talked long and hard about this and came to the difficult decision to cease operations and return our focus to our respective careers. It was an amazing experience I’m exceptionally grateful for, and one we might have returned to had life not taken other turns.

Keto-Snaps were a grain-free, ketogenic cookie developed by my wife Lisa Jubilee, MS CDN, a holistic NYC nutritionist. She began making them in 2016 for clients, and by 2017 had partnered with me to explore taking them to the public. From 2017 through 2019 we ran with it, and Keto-Snaps grew quickly to become a promising CPG brand with potential investors. Unfortunately, the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic quickly shut down production, and in early 2020 we made the difficult decision to close the brand. Keto-Snaps officially ended in March, 2020.

While the brand didn’t survive, the Keto-Snaps brand journey was immensely valuable, regardless the short run. We became food handler certified, incorporated, trained on commercial-grade food production machinery, learned and implemented food labeling standards per law, navigated the Shopify and Amazon seller universes, marketed, social media-ed, customer serviced, and much more. It was humbling, exciting, fun, exhausting, and ultimately economically not sustainable, but rife with valuable learnings.

The 1.0 brand look didn’t last. It was playful and bold, a design developed with a home-baked, old-timey vibe, and skewed towards parents and their kids. We came to recognize this was off-brand for what we wanted Keto-Snaps to be, a sophisticated nutrition brand for active adults. This prompted a more formal branding process on my part where I did comparative market research and studied product design strategy a bit. This lead to our introduction of the box in early 2018. Keto-Snaps Branding 2.0.

We loved the 2.0 box. They were economical, easy to assemble, and stored easily. Eliminating the hand application of labels was a serious time savings. One big problem though, they did not adequately protect the cookies during shipping. An issue with our product was the almond flour which produces a delicious and crunchy cookie, but an easily broken one. This became a real problem and customer feedback drove us eventually to once again revisit our packaging.

Branding 3.0: To solve for the breakage issue we returned once again to tin packaging. This time in smaller, portable containers. This was not a brand ID revision, but a packaging change. We also rolled out two new flavors with this packaging, Cacao and Ginger. We had solid sales success with all three flavors and began to develop a loyal customer base more closely aligned with our target market.

Following the launch of our two new flavors we set up our Amazon sellers account and began selling through Amazon in addition to our Shopify site. We also got noticed up by a well known fitness influencer who included our product in his book, began to attended trade shows and made some significant connections with potential partners.