Assignment 3: Pizza Roll
Joe Haynes and Claudia Dubé
Original Ideas
Idea #1: Sauces
Our first idea centered around playing with how conventional dipping sauces and pizza rolls could come together. We took this basic idea in three directions. First, redesigning the packaging in order to contain sauces with pizza rolls. Second, designing a separate packaging that would contain the dipping sauces. Third, creating a hack to make a pizza roll dipping sauce out of pizza rolls.
We liked the direction that all three sauce ideas were going in. The tray design of the packaging felt like a novel way to make the basic packaging more useable, and the sauce packaging felt like another unique way to get the product out there in an area you might not necessarily expect to see Totino’s. As for the sauce hack, it was a lot better than we anticipated, and it’s something we think might mesh well for plating pizza rolls during the critique. Although it was better then anticipated, we didn’t anticipate very much so there was still an issue in balancing the taste, and improving its visual appeal, that we wanted to potentially work on in future iterations.
Idea #2: Flat Graphics
In this take on the redesign, we focused on modernizing the idea. In a lot of the discussion we’ve had between ourselves and with other people the package design of pizza rolls a it felt like there were two primary issues with the packaging. The first being that it feels dated, and the second is that it has an associated stigma with it. People associate the packaging with a cheap, unhealthy product. In our attempt to modernize it, we focused on the flat design graphics, and the minimalism associated with it, to give the packaging a different feel to it. We also focused on clarifying information about the product that was obscured in the design of the original packaging.
This idea also felt very good to us, and the design changes that we made felt new and interesting to us while still maintaining the identifiable style of pizza rolls.
Idea #3: Portion Control
This idea mainly focused on adjusting the sizing of the packaging, and how the pizza rolls would be sealed within the cardboard box. The idea was to have too potential portion options, a snack size (6 rolls) and a meal size (12 rolls), and throughout the different size packaging you would have varying amounts of these set package sizes. We also felt that you could partition these in such a way that the snack and meal sized were separated, and then could design around that.
For this idea we liked the idea of controlling the portions, and we felt the ideas surrounding the potential packaging were clever and interesting but at its core it felt like it was just partitioning pizza rolls which wasn’t necessarily the most innovative thing. So it would have to be another idea reliant on redesigning the packaging. Below is our idea of how we imagined this playing out in the packaging.
Refined Idea:
During the Wednesday test lab we presented our three ideas to the general mills representative, and got some great feedback. She liked adding sauces to the packaging, but also feared that people would be too attached to their own specific sauces so any packaged sauces would have to be unique or special enough to justify their existence. For the flat graphic design route she really liked the direction we were heading, but at the same time felt that we could easily work it into the sauce or portion control idea. Finally, for the portion control she was skeptical of how people would react to having a set size to make. She felt that it might be too restrictive, and put people off.
Final Idea
For the sauce, here is the recipe we created.
Ingredients:
5 fresh Roma tomatoes
4 cloves of garlic, slivered
8 pizza rolls of your choosing
Olive Oil
Seasonings:
Oregano
Red Pepper Flakes
Salt
Equipment:
Food Processor
Immersion Blender
Steps:
- Bring water to a boil, slice an X into the top of each tomato and submerge in water for 30 seconds
- Remove the tomatoes, let cool, and then peel the skin off of the tomatoes
- Hand crush the tomatoes in a mixing bowl, add in approximately a 1/4th cup of water to the bowl
- Coat a frying pan with a conservative amount of olive oil, add in slivered garlic and cook on medium low heat
- When garlic begins to simmer, add in the crushed tomatoes
- Season to taste
- While occasionally stirring and crushing the tomatoes, cook 8 pizza rolls in oven at 450 degrees for about 12 to 15 minutes
- Add cooked pizza rolls to food processor with a slight amount of oil, blend
- Add minced pizza rolls to sauce
- Pour sauce into mixing bowl, use immersion blender to blend any remaining chunks
- Serve!
