Case Study · Consumer / CPG

Nutritional Choices Inc.

A full site rebuild for a New York food manufacturer, moving the brand out of the K–12 lunchroom and into a grown-up, better-for-you snack aisle, without losing the school business that paid the bills.

11 Pages, from scratch

6 Product detail pages

8 yrs Live in production

The brief

Nutritional Choices makes whole-grain, allergen-friendly snacks: Bbar Brownies, mini graham bites, animal crackers, waffle bites, a vegan chocolate-chip cookie, all produced in a Kosher, nut-free facility on Long Island. The business had been built on the K–12 channel: schools, day cares, camps, healthcare accounts. The existing site was a WordPress build that looked the part: juvenile, playful, aimed at lunch directors and eight-year-olds.

The brief was a rebrand: pivot the public face of the company toward a millennial, health-conscious consumer buying for themselves. The reference points came from the client: RXBar, RBar, Larabar. Clean, adult, unmistakably retail. But the K–12 business had to stay. The new site couldn't repel institutional buyers; it had to route them to a dedicated section without dragging their aesthetic through the front door.

The approach

First round: light, spacious, minimal, the obvious read of "clean and simple." It looked calm, and clashed with the bright packaging. Second round: bold palette, high-contrast product-on- colour compositions closer to the reference set. That direction locked in, and the rest of the build ran off it.

The product line drove the structure. Six product detail pages, each built from a client-supplied sell sheet, with a product image on a color field, ingredients and highlights, nutritional facts, and a per-product call to action: Amazon for the two SKUs available at retail, a direct email for the four that weren't. The two adult-buyer entry points (home, About) and the institutional-buyer entry point (K–12) got distinct treatments, with the same footer and product menu tying them back together.

All product photography came in as PDF sell sheets, not transparent PNGs. Every product image on the site was a hand cut from those PDFs. Stock lifestyle photography was licensed and composited to place the actual products into scenes the client couldn't have shot in time for launch. Standard Terms of Use and Privacy Policy were added to cover the contact form.

The result

Launched April 2, 2018, replacing the WordPress installation with a fully static site under the same domain. It has been the company's public site continuously since then, and remains in production more than eight years later. That's a long time for a static build to hold, especially in a category where redesigns are usually annual.