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.