There are myriad ways custom candy molds can boost your candy-making business. From building brand awareness and creating opportunities for word-of-mouth marketing to building positive brand associations and elevating product perception, it’s easy to see why custom mold designs can be a good idea.
Once a business is committed to creating a custom candy mold, deciding which design best represents your brand is a bit more complicated. As business owners ourselves, we know your products speak to clients before you do. Making a good first impression is key, and custom molds are a great way to do that.
The mold must create a candy that is visually-appealing, appetizing, and clearly conveys what you want it to. In addition to looks, functionality and ease-of-use must also be considered. Consumer expectations must be carefully weighed to ensure the candy shapes align with their perceptions.
Throughout Truffly Made’s many years of creating custom silicone candy molds for businesses, our team has learned a lot about what works best to create products that best represent great brands. Let’s dive into a few of the major considerations to review.
To Brand or not to Brand?
Creating a custom mold that features a brand’s logo can make candies more easily recognizable, helping brands to stand out in a crowded market. This can help build a loyal customer base, and set a particular product apart on grocery store shelves.
When customers continue to buy a product they have previously purchased, they expect consistency. If the logo chosen for a custom mold is too intricate, demolding becomes more challenging, resulting in less consistent candies. Detailed logo designs can look great on packaging, but are sometimes rendered illegible when recreated with chocolate, hard candy, or gummies, and can lose clarity with some coating types.
Intricate designs can be adapted to better suit candy molds. Simplifying a complicated design can make it more legible and elegant, all while maintaining brand integrity. Alternatively, incorporating structural supports, webbing, or a silhouette for delicate or thin designs can make it easier to produce molds for complicated designs.
It’s important to note that a branded mold doesn’t necessarily have to have a logo on it. A Hershey’s kiss is a great example of branding without a logo. Any unique, easily-recognizable shape can become associated with a brand through integrated marketing strategies and staggered rollout.
Managing Consumer Expectations
The phrase “people eat with their eyes first” is more than just a saying. How a product looks informs the expectations of taste a customer will have.
Imagine picking up a purple-colored hard candy at the store to satisfy a grape craving, only to discover it was apple-flavored. Understandably, you’d be a little disappointed, and you might even decide not to buy from that brand again.
Shape functions similarly to inform expectations, and should be a consideration when designing custom molds. Miami chocolatier Garcia Nevett reports that “studies have found that the shape has a more significant part to play in the overall enjoyment of our favorite chocolate bite!”
A study published in Springer Nature Link explored the extent to which the shape of a chocolate impacts how a consumer thinks it will taste. For example, rounded chocolates were expected to taste sweeter, less bitter, and more creamy than chocolates with sharp, angular edges. Angular designs influence flavor expectations toward sour profiles, and geometrical shapes may evoke emotional responses.
The shape of a chocolate can impact the actual taste just as much as the predicted taste. Surface area affects the intensity of the flavor on the palate, making a sweet taste more or less strong. Chocolates crafted in molds with larger surface areas “release flavor molecules more rapidly,” making for a more intense flavor more quickly while chocolates with smaller surface areas do the opposite.
It’s important to keep in mind how the look of a sweet communicates its expected and actual taste. This doesn’t necessarily mean a business shouldn’t design a rounded mold shape for a successful line of salted caramel and dark chocolate truffles if the shape is on-brand. Managing consumer expectations is challenging and nuanced, often operating on a case-by-case basis.
Ease of Using Silicone Molds
Functionality and ease of use go hand in hand. The shape of a mold largely determines how easy it will be to demold. In an industrial kitchen, efficiency is key. If the design of a mold makes it harder for a candymaker to remove, the extra effort it takes in production can cost a business valuable time, money, and resources.
Many custom mold designs are supported by flexibility. Rigid plastic or metal molds require demolding techniques which could be challenging or complicated, or even risk damaging the shape of the candy upon removal.
Silicone molds, however, make it easier to remove more complicated or deeply-textured custom mold shapes. Especially when paired with a Universal Demolder or Automatic Demolder that releases every candy in one pop, the flexible, non-stick nature of the silicone leads to easier removal and a better chance of perfectly preserving unique custom mold shapes.
While most shapes can be easily demolded with silicone molds, undercuts should generally be avoided. Inward-angled cavities can trap candies inside the mold, making clean demolding challenging if not impossible. Rounded sweets release from molds more smoothly than sweets with multiple sharp edges.
Smaller, more intricate designs can be more difficult to demold, eating up valuable time on a busy production line, even with automatic demolders. Gummies and hard candies can be more challenging to release than chocolates, so selecting easy-to-remove shapes, especially for bulk production, is especially important.
Create Custom Candy Molds with Truffly Made
Custom candy molds offer an opportunity to create unique candies, align your sweets with your brand, or launch a new product line. At Truffly Made, we specialize in creating custom high-quality food-grade silicone molds that align with your brand.
Explore creative custom mold options by reaching out to our team for a quote or simply filling out the form here. Send us your idea, and we’ll send a technical drawing for review. Once approved, we create a 3D sample of your mold based on the drawing and your input.
The next step is sending the 3D sample mold to your business to test the functionality of the design. After the mold has been drafted, tested, and approved, Truffly Made can create as many custom molds as your team needs for production. You’ll have your batch of custom molds within 50 days from when the technical drawings are approved.
Learn more about growing your business with custom molds by visiting trufflymade.com, reading our blog about the benefits of custom mold design, or reach out to us directly for a quote.