A Brand New Look: 5 Reasons Why Take 5 Changed Its Package

A Radical Reboot

Since Hershey introduced Take 5 in 2004, it has arguably been the perfect candy, and it's easy to forget how revolutionary it was at the time.  Before Take 5, chocolate-covered pretzels were expensive and hard to find, available mainly in specialty boutique chocolate shops.  Remember, this was before the Trader Joe's chocolate-covered pretzel era.  Hershey took this pretzel-chocolate foundation and enhanced it with three nearly bullet-proof additions: peanuts, peanut butter, and caramel, and the result was chewy, crunchy, salty-sweet heaven.  At the time, its original packaging made perfect sense, the red and yellow color scheme echoing other products in the Hershey product line like Kit-Kat, Krackel, and to a lesser extent the whole Reese's family of products.  Plus, its beautiful cutaway product shot proudly displayed the chewy nutty goodies underneath the chocolate robe.  But 11 years is a long time for any packaging design to go without a refresh, and so we now have a new Take 5 wrapper, and it is so drastically different from what came before it that we have to ask: what does it all mean?

Take 5, before (top) and after (bottom).  Gone is the classic, straightforward design, replaced by a jazzy, hip, helter-skelter approach.

Blame the Millennials
While precise sales figures are unavailable, Hershey has been struggling to market the brand to the younger generation, and the stodgy traditional wrapper was an easy target for blame.  So in 2016, Hershey partnered with what they're calling a panel of "diverse millennial-aged students" to come up with a new packaging design.  The result looks a little bit like an art-school collaborative project, doesn't it?  But instead of looking at the jaunty, turbocharged, black and neon-green collaged look superficially, let me propose five theories as to the concrete logical marketing purpose behind this new look.

Theory 1 - Creating a Healthful Image: Take 5 is, as I said, a delicious candy but it is candy.  Hershey does everything it can, though, to downplay this in the new design.  The pretzel, its waffle-cut shape revealed for the first time, is foregrounded, as is a large dollop of peanut butter and a peanut, while the chocolate is barely shown at the top right, alongside a meager strip of caramel that could easily be mistaken for additional peanut butter.  Note also how the package shows real creamy peanut butter, not the sweetened peanut butter fudge that you really find inside.  Together with the eco-green text and text backing, you get the impression more of trail mix in a bar, not a concoction featuring peanut butter fudge, caramel, and chocolate.

The reality of Take 5 is chewy, fudgy, crunchy, and chocolatey.  But their new packaging cries out light and healthy.

Theory 2 - Product Differentiation: What had earlier been an asset, signaling that Take 5 has a relationship with other Hershey's classics like Kit-Kat, Reese's, and Krackel, was now a liability.  Candy shelves are crowded today and red as a background color is so commonly used that Take 5 almost certainly didn't "pop" from the shelf like this new design does.

If you were to squint, could you differentiate this older packaging from the "Big Kat" Kit-Kat bar or a number of other well-known Hershey's items? Could you even distinguish it from a bag of Skittles at a distance?

Theory 3 - Explaining the Product: Whereas the original packaging showed a cutaway that revealed the innards of the candy, it didn't give a clear picture of exactly what was inside. The new packaging separates out all five tastes and clearly displays them so the consumers know what they're getting.  Pretzel fans lock in on the prominently displayed pretzel, chocolate and peanut butter fans do the same, and so on.

Theory 4 - Celebrating Racial Diversity: No, I'm not kidding.  Hershey proudly announced that the product design panel consisted of "diverse millennial-aged students" and the color palette on the new wrapper is black, grey, dark brown, tan/beige/yellow, white, and green.  If you've ever heard someone say "I don't care if you're black, white, brown, green, or whatever" then this color-continuum approach perfectly expresses that sentiment.

Slightly off-center but lyrically connected, the look of the package and the name of the candy could very well allude to jazz in general, and specifically to the Dave Brubeck classic.

Theory 5 - Someone at Hershey's is a Dave Brubeck Fan: I don't know whether the name of this candy originally referenced Dave Brubeck's distinctive quintuple-time composition "Take Five" or not, but it's hard not to notice the visual allusions to jazz in the wrapper's visual composition. Elements are arranged in a seemingly disorganized yet coherent contrapuntal arrangement that is dissonant and harmonious at the same time.  Comparisons to the Harlem-cubism of a Norman Lewis, the rhythmic collages of Romare Bearden, or the layered, musically radiant forms of Aaron Douglas could easily be justified.  Dave Brubeck passed away a mere four months prior to the product redesign and his memory could easily have been fresh in the minds of some of Hershey's creative types.

Ever cautious, as businesses tend to be, Hershey let loyal fans know that the new look was on the horizon.

Conclusions
Change always takes some getting used to, but this new package is starting to grow on me.  And any way you slice it, Take 5 still belongs in the beloved pantheon of classic American candy.

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