The Chia Co Chia Packet

This project had its challenges; however, as a repeat customer of ours, this company knew that the team here at Spur Creative could pull it off and get them exactly what they wanted.

As you can see, we made the packet incredibly realistic; we wanted to make the packet look as though it had product seen through the viewing pane. We created this illusion by using the real product glued to the inside of a clear sheet of acrylic; this was something we’d never done before, working with real food, so it was nerve-wracking not knowing what the glue or humidity would do to the real seed, but it all turned out ok.

Replicating the imagery was something else our team had to execute. Making something at a giant scale like this was an interesting task. There was nothing but a tiny picture of the original (and much smaller-sized) packaging to work from, which had its problems – but what’s a job without a slight challenge?

We sculpted the shape of the packet in polystyrene. At 8 foot high, this is one giant prop packet of seeds. We made a 2 part mould of the polystyrene sculpture of the seed packet, then cast it in fibreglass, leaving room for the seeds to go. Once we had cast a fibreglass packet from the mould we had to sand it until we ended up with a lovely smooth surface as we were going to apply conformable vinyl to the finished piece.

The middle section was taken away and reinforced so that we could vacuum form clear plastic over it. The machine used to vacuum form uses tons of pressure and will easily crush a fibreglass structure. The clear plastic section is the pane of clear plastic on seed packets that displays the contents inside.

 Once the vinyl had been applied it looked exactly like the real thing. To stay true to the original packet we asked The Chia Company to send us the original artwork used for their seed packets and we scaled it up so that it would fit a packet over 100 times its original size.