A fresh starch: A group of six Cal Poly students designed a new way to sustainably package potatoes 

Cal Poly students are changing the way produce is packaged, several potatoes at a time. Their ideas placed them in the top three in a nationwide student design challenge, replacing brown, meshy potato sacks with a bright blue sturdy and stackable box.

These six students, studying art and design, business, or industrial technology and packaging, combined their passions to create what they named the Lively Roots project, a sleek paperboard package designed to effectively hold fresh potatoes and be sustainable as well.

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• Photo Courtesy Of Marathon Strategies
• TATER-TOTE Cal Poly's Lively Roots project rethinks potato packaging, giving consumers an effective and sustainable way to transport potatoes from the grocery store to the kitchen.

Inspiration for such a design came from the Paperboard Packaging Alliance, which holds a yearly student competition challenging students to think outside the box when it comes to sustainable, everyday product packaging by replacing plastic with paper. This year's theme was fresh produce.

The 2024 winter/spring quarters team includes Cal Poly students Carter Rust, Evan Toji, Rayna Farkas, Danny Fowler, Phoebe Liu, and Jordi Rodriguez with advisors Irene Carbonell, Javier de la Fuente, and Linh Toscani.

With endless produce options, the group chose potatoes because the product's packaging is full of plastic, and they felt potatoes were often overlooked.

"We wanted to choose potatoes because we thought potatoes are forgotten about, like you kind of leave them on the bottom of your shelf and forget about them," industrial technology and packaging major Fowler said. "We wanted to highlight a fresh product that sometimes doesn't get as much love as the other ones."

Business student Liu said the group also considered typical potato packaging to be unsustainable.

"[The Lively Roots project] started off as herb design, and then we kind of migrated into like root products, and eventually ended up on baby potatoes because we think they're really impacted by plastic packaging, especially the mesh bag packaging," she said. "So that kind of stood out to us as something we wanted to provide a sustainable solution for."

As a business student with a concentration in consumer packaging, Liu said a fun part of the project was to learn about the other disciplines that contributed to the final product.

"I think it's just really cool working with the different types of teams we have within [the group]. We're all a little bit different majors as well, so getting everyone's perspective and different backgrounds to work together on this project was really cool," she said. "In my personal experience, I don't have much experience within the graphic design background. It was really neat to see the graphic design approach to that as well."

The team for the student challenge is a collaboration between two courses at Cal Poly—Fiber-based Packaging and Graphic Design III—that dedicate the spring and fall quarters to completing the yearly Paperboard Packaging Alliance project. Cal Poly submissions have placed in the nation's top three since 2021.

Toji, who recently graduated from Cal Poly in graphic design, said this project was a way he could bring mass graphic design back to life after seeing many designs flop.

"I've had a lot of interaction with graphic design, especially in a production manner where a lot of what you do becomes real-life printed things," he said. "And for me, I was sad about seeing how the designs would become mass produced with a lot of waste in the design."

In contrast, Toji said, the Lively Roots project provided him with the opportunity to create good graphic designs that served an environmental purpose.

"Going back and forth between the teams, you find a really great middle ground between how graphic design can highlight these important sustainability aspects in our design," he said.

The competition provides the students with real-world experience and also helps solidify their career goals within the packaging industry.

Industrial technology and packaging major Rodriguez said the Cal Poly program helps students navigate their interests and role in the large field of packaging.

"I think it's a very niche kind of environment, but once you actually break into that, it's so large and there's so much that goes into it, right? It's not just making a box," he said. "It's a lot about production design, innovation, creativity. I think this experience really helped me understand that, ... and I really want to continue exploring and just see how far I can get with it."

Farkas studies graphic communication and said the program has expanded her understanding of engineering packing structures, which she will use in her graphic design future.

"This experience really made me a stronger designer who can understand the structural side and the graphic design side and how both teams interact," she said.

This year, the Student Design Challenge received 27 submissions. The top three designing teams, which includes the Cal Poly team, are invited to the Paperboard Packaging Alliance Leadership Conference at the end of September in Atlanta, where they will present their products and be placed first to third and awarded cash prizes.

Previous competitor Kelly Felner, who is now a judge for the design challenge, helped determine Cal Poly as a top competitor.

According to Felner, the students' project was ranked high because of its graphic design, size, and consideration of the consumer.

"The graphics were adorable. They stood out great on the shelves. But then once you took them home, you could actually stack them in your pantry. And they had these little tear-off perforated strips so that you could display them, but you could reach in and grab your potatoes when you needed to," she said. "And so it made the consumer's life a lot better in regards to how they thought about packaging."

From now until Sept. 30, the students will work with their advisors to prepare for their presentation at the upcoming conference.

"If we can get first place, I think that'll be really great, and we've been working each week with our professors to hone down our presentation until we hit it perfect," Fowler said. "We'll be there to try to get No. 1." Δ

Reach Staff Writer Libbey Hanson at [email protected].