Musafari

Design: Krutika Shah, Shreya Shah, Krishangi Agarwal
Project Type: Student Project
School: Pearl Academy
Course: Communication Design
Location: Mumbai, India
Packaging Contents: Indian Gujurati Cuisine – Travel Food
Packaging Substrate / Materials: Brown Paper, Cloth, Butter Paper
Printing Process: Digital Printing

Gujurati cuisine belongs to the western state of Gujarat in India. It is healthy, tasty and a wholesome Gujurati meal contains all variations of flavours. In India, certain Gujurati dishes have been people’s favorite travel food choice since the longest time because they are delicious to eat, have a long shelf life, are easy to carry and can fill an empty stomach on-the-go.

Musafari is a Gujarati travel food brand which is positioned to the urban Indian travelers who tend to buy snacks and food for travel purposes. The food selection involves four items: Thepla (bread), Chundo (pickle), Khakra (savoury) and Gudpapdi (sweet). These four dishes aim to form a good wholesome meal with different flavors and textures.

The packaging of the brand Musafari aims to capture the culture, vivid textile prints and embroidery patterns from Gujarat, which are missing in the existing Gujurati travel food packaging in the country. Additionally, it represents the values of the brand like sustainability, reusability and providing employment to the women textile workers from Gujurat. As such, it pays respect to the rich culture and the dignified artisans of Gujarat and their craftmanship, which is India’s pride in the craft industry. The packaging also ensures the maintenance of quality, hygiene and taste of the food.

It consists of a modern version of the ‘potli’, which is a traditional cloth bag shaped in the form of a pot and that is native to the culture of Gujurat. The Musafari potli is ode to the traditional potli and is an innovative design which serves as a carry bag when stringed up and a table mat when opened and laid flat on any surface. It is a simple, reusable design which uses cotton textile fabric of Gujurat, hand stitched by the women artisan of Gujarat.

Each of the four dishes that sit inside the potli has a unique packaging style, different to the already existing market options. Theplas are rolled like a wrapped candy, in sets of 10 which sufficiently serves two people in one go. Chundo, the pickle, is packaged in a hard glass bottle which is air tight and reusable. Khakra boxes are custom made in a circular form which again is reusable and sustainable because of the brown card paper they are made of. Lastly, the sweet Gudpapdi is cut in rectangular bars like granola bars, wrapped in butter paper and sold in boxes containing six of the bars.

What’s Unique?
The Musafari packaging is unique because it is sustainable, safe and convenient to carry and consume. The drawback in the existing packaging of Gujurati travel food is that it uses a lot of plastic and tiny stapler pins that are highly unsafe, if consumed by mistake. Aesthetically, the existing packaging is too bland and unpleasant with no reference or association to Gujurat and its culture. These issues are worked upon and improved in the packaging design of Musafari products. Moreover, packaging does not end at the individual stage of products but includes the carry bag (potli) too which brings the products together and truly represents the essence of the brand. The potli is the most valuable innovative asset of the brand product packaging because of its unique design, purpose and also, the promotion of use of modern cloth carry bags over environmentally harmful plastic bags.