We Were Called Copycats -- 10 Years Of Design

“Someone said we’re the copycat high protein ramen.”

A message had popped up on my Discord. My brow furrowed, and I went to go look at the comments on social media platforms.

“What the fu--”

Another company had released their new set of ramen flavors, and their venture capital money was pumping ads like crazy. The problem was... the flavor names sounded really similar to our original 3 flavors.

Right down, even, to the exact adjectives used. I kept scrolling.

“You’re kidding me.”

A list of wild accusations appeared before me from random commenters. One claimed we had taken this other company’s bold colored, minimalistic design, while others accused of stealing this other company’s origin story, as if Tom and I weren’t actual twins with similar names, while still others scoffed at us and called us poor imitations of the “real thing”.

But there was a frustrating problem here.

You see, we were the original high protein ramen, half a decade below them.

What the hell was going on?

When we’re little, and even in many of the movies and stories we love as adults, we’re told to not be shallow, to look deeper than the surface.

Don’t judge books by their covers, as the saying goes.

What is design, after all, but visual communication in an attempt to prevent oneself from being misunderstood?

But also...

What if you have so much you want to talk about that you have no idea how to shorten it all into a package, because if you shorten things, then what if someone gets the wrong idea, like they always do, and misunderstand things again and then you’d have to explain more so that they don’t get the wrong idea again but somehow as you explain more, they get more agitated and say you’re making excuses when you’re just trying to make yourself clear and so you try to predict what kind of context they need and go on a little tangent to clarify the contexts involved and then they don’t understand why you brought that into the conversation and you try to explain that more but they’re getting more irritated at you and you don’t know where you lost them and what they don’t get and you try to--

And that’s why, when we started, we wanted to be called Smart Ramen, and the decisions that came from this, good and bad, led to us being mistaken for a copycat, despite being the originals.

Smart Ramen.

The VERY FIRST design ever

A name born out of social insecurity, and a desire to be known, and an attempt to use the shorthand that we’ve seen others use.

A name born out of the fear of being misunderstood.

But why is Smart Ramen a name based on insecurity?

And why was the packaging made like this...

...for so long, and why has it changed so much?

Let’s take a big step back, over a decade ago, to the faraway land of 2015.

My twin brother and cofounder, Tom, who’s no longer at the company but hangs around in the discord sometimes, was the one in charge of design and marketing at the start. Our skills were largely complimentary-- he had a clinical nutrition major from UC Davis, and is an incredible artist with good taste and an eye for good design.

I had left my career cooking in fine dining, Michelin Star restaurants, had been a writer my whole life, and was studying for a Managerial Economics degree at UC Davis.

Picture of the very first mix Tom and I made at our parents' place

With our skills combined, we thought, how hard could this whole thing really be?

Back then, we had no idea we were neurodivergent, and just how strongly our ADHD and autism actually affected our lives, and even our design. We’d known we were different from others, since we’d received our fair share of bullying back in the day and were always kind of known as weird in some kind of way(well, at least, I was).

But, we’d been proficient enough in general social skills that we chalked it up to “well surely everyone gets bullied and called a weird kid,” as if me playing MTG at the lunch table every day and running D&D campaigns wasn’t an early indication of my autism. :^)

It sounds stereotypical, but the interactive, simplistic systems, and even the roleplay that let us practice social skills safely created the foundations of how we saw the world, and influenced the shape of how we approached design, and indeed, communication within that design.

But not knowing this about ourselves back then created massive problems of nutrition communication with packaging and website design that we still struggle with to this day.
The irony of that same neurodivergence is that we were somewhat capable of seeing when we did things because “other people would like it” compared to what we, ourselves, really believed in. The name “Smart Ramen,” was picked from this insecurity, trying to find a good name “other people would like.”

Yet despite the name, Tom’s sense for visual design and research was strong. Back in 2015, there weren't many ecommerce sites that sold specialty ramen, and most everything came from grocery store shelves.

We knew at least that we needed to create some kind of packaging that stood out against all of the packaging, even if we weren’t directly competing with them for shelf space. The pattern was pretty clear back then-- designs generally consisted of a logo, and a big bowl of ramen on the front, and not too much more.

My actual ramen shelf from back in the day. For, uh, "research" :^)  (After I had organized it, tyvm -Eris)

So, if we wanted to communicate that we were dramatically different from other ramen... How would we do that?

When researching, we found that clean, aesthetic minimalism was starting to take shape, being particularly good for ecommerce sites, since minimalism meant less data to load, and a faster, more responsive website as a result. Our ramen, after all, was born of the desire for protein and nutritional completeness, following in the footsteps of Soylent, but for people who wanted actual, delicious, and shelf stable food.

Therefore, we chose white as our primary background color, because no other packet used white as the background color, and it was a color that communicated cleanliness, purity, transparency, openness, and was reminiscent of the lab coat and sterile white labs to show our nutrition science background.

Then, we chose green as the primary color, 86C440, a number that I've committed to memory, as that classic color for health and nutrition.

And then, the biggest choice of them all.

We decided to not put a bowl of ramen on the front at all.

Smart Ramen really seems slapped on here, doesn't it?

During this design process, we’d been in the process of filing for the “Smart Ramen” trademark. Then, suddenly, we saw our trademark application challenged.

Someone else was already using a similar name, and had moved to block us.
We were devastated. We’d already spent so much time and money already, and we’d shown off the initial packaging on social media. Our trademark lawyer said that if our hearts were set on it, we could still fight it. The challenge was on a similar name, after all, and not an exact “Smart Ramen” name.

But lawyers are $500 per hour.

We shook our heads in despair, then, facing the first of many setbacks... And yet, looking back, I can only laugh, and thank the other company for it.
See, the thing was, we had already named the company Vite, a quadruple pun of sorts, with “Vite” (Vy-t) meaning life in Italian, “Vite” (veet) meaning quick in French, “Vite” being one word from “bite,” describing the bite of good alkaline noodles, and “Vit” also being the latin prefix for “vitamin.”

We were already operating under the company name of “Vite LLC,” or “Vite Kitchens”. Once upon a time, we’d pondered using that name, being “Vite Ramen,” and yet... who would know what “Vite” was? Who would care?

We’d been nervous. We didn’t want to be misunderstood.

But now, with our Smart Ramen name blocked...

The thing about a name is that it can be something that someone is familiar with, and carries some previous context with. Brands like Dollar Shave Club for instance, are very literal, whereas others, like Nike, or Yeti, carry the prestige of their namesakes to cultivate a certain presence, even before you know what they do.

A name like Vite, though?

To most people, it meant nothing. But nothing, sometimes, is good.

Nothing means a clean slate to build from. Nothing means no preconceived notions, no contexts to fight against. Nothing means a blank, white page to design from, just like the white background of our packaging.

And the moment we took a deep breath, nodded, and committed to it, everything seemed like it fell into place like it was always meant to be there.

The Vite Ramen logo came together quickly, the opposing V and A fitting together seamlessly, and replacing the “Smart Ramen” on the front of our packaging--

It felt perfect. Bold colors, against a bright background, curved lines reminiscent of wavy noodles.

Clean, minimalist, a design unlike any other ramen out there, a design that would remain for years... and yet, the packaging was still saying “Smart Ramen” in its colors and design language behind it all.

And it would be years before we’d be accused of being the copycat.

That packaging and brand design debuted with our Kickstarter, and it was successful-- memorable, bright, different, playful, in all the ways other ramen brands weren’t.

But, when we first ran our Kickstarter, we didn’t really know just how many costs were involved in making the ramen. We priced things out according to the quotes we got, but there were so, so many costs that we didn’t understand yet. Insurance, secondary packaging, dynamic shipping costs or realizing that packing orders into boxes and taping them up took a lot of time and labor.
We’d always known our ramen would have to be more expensive than the dime a dozen brands out there. The real pork, chicken, miso, etc we put in, the high quality nutrients we selected, being made here in the USA with the people over profit we were committed to, and all the other things we did to make Vite Ramen the way we’d dreamed it should be all meant that it couldn’t be made cheaply.

Still, at the price we had set during Kickstarter, even back then with the smaller facility and lower headcount, we were barely breaking even just on materials, much less the additional labor, electricity, rent, and everything else that had to be paid.

Some pictures of the early days

After being faced with the realities of just how expensive a food factory was, we realized we couldn’t keep that price we had during Kickstarter, and had to raise the price.

...And that’s when we began to realize the difficulties of the branding colors and cheery design we’d went with.

We finished our Kickstarter deliveries, and started general sales in 2019. Things looked good for a little bit, and everything seemed like it would go well...

And then, 2020 hit, and with it... COVID, the shutdowns, and the spike in inflation and prices of everything. It drove our costs through the roof, even as we faced down wildfires that threatened to burn down our facility, often putting us out of being able to produce for weeks at a time. Yet, we still stayed committed to our beliefs and values-- I’m proud to say that we didn’t miss a single payroll through COVID, and kept everyone paid, so they could afford rent and living, even when we couldn’t do anything for safety’s sake.

But see, even at the earliest Kickstarter pricing, people complained about the costs. Nowadays, there’s more of a premium ramen market(unironcally because we proved the market), but ramen sold at anything beyond a buck was considered overpriced, no matter what was in it, even if it beat fast food in price, taste, and nutrition. Price, back then, was the #1 complaint that we got, always.

This was something we’d struggled with for a long time.

Every time people would talk about price, we’d try to talk to them as much as possible, give them the whole spiel and find that, 99 times out of 100, they wouldn’t care... or more likely, wouldn’t read it at all.

If only we could explain more to them, we’d thought. If only we could just talk to them more, then they’d understand.

But they never did, and we grew increasingly frustrated. There were, after all, other higher end, premium versions of other foods that didn’t have all the work we put into our ramen, and people bought those happily and without complaint.

gg 4 me

Why was our ramen considered so different, despite all the nutrition we’d put in? Why didn’t people understand that we’d made arguably one of the healthiest foods to exist, even backed by the UC Davis head of clinical nutrition then?

There was a photoshoot we did, once.

Most of it had the bright backgrounds, white cleanliness, the design we’d decided on since the start. But amongst those photos, there were just a few that had dark backgrounds-- black, fading off into nothingness, a dramatic splotch of color and image set against a spotlight.

And we started to notice something.

When those images were present, whether it was ads or social media posts, there were noticeably fewer comments complaining about the price. And so we tried a few more, tested a few more, and our suspicions began to grow.

Honestly really like these concepts still

So, one day, we decided to test something drastic.

We completely changed the default backgrounds of our website to a dark theme, and what we discovered was nothing short of shocking.

With nothing else changed, just the backgrounds going from white to black, or dark...

The rate of complaints dropped by half, and the rate at which people purchased rose by nearly 30%.

We were stunned. Why was this happening?

We immediately began to dig deeper into it... and began to understand, more than ever, that people judge books by their covers.

See, when people clicked onto our store and saw bright colors, that cheery design, they fell back on the context that they knew. That style of branding was used by cheaper brands, and even though minimalistic design, at least back then, tended to not be used by bargain brands, the combination of the design language we were using made people assume that our ramen would be priced similarly to the couple-cents-per-packet instant ramen that people were most familiar with.

But when given the dark black background, even with the bright colors still present on our packaging and elsewhere, that perception had completely flipped.
It created a more mature, sophisticated atmosphere-- not quite luxury, as we hadn’t exactly changed anything else to create a luxury feel, but immediately made the perception of quality and care stand out more than anything.

Turns out that changing the cover of our book did, in fact, make people judge us differently.

But... Our packaging was still the same.

We weren’t sure what to do. Something, we thought, had to change about the packaging, and our design. Tom, by this point, had exited the company, and I was struggling in learning the marketing and design myself. At most, we’d change the backgrounds of our website, but to change the entire branding?

That wasn’t something I was confident about. I remember in desperation, I had gone to do another grocery run on ramen, to browse packaging, and hope that inspiration somehow struck again, as it had many years before.

There, I discovered something jarring, that I posted in the Discord:

“There's a Sichuan ramen that I still haven't tried because it actually does also use a minimalist design like ours, with no pictures of ingredients on it, and so when I'm browsing on what to eat I just straight up don't even consider it an option.”

If I was judging packaging because there was no food on it...

Then surely, others were judging our packaging as well in the same way.

In all of our design so far, we’d tried to stick to the minimalism on the packaging, and to be fair to the younger us, we’d done a pretty good job of shortening, and otherwise writing the information on the kickstarter and website to summarize things like the nutrition, and vitamins and minerals.

But one thing we’d never really emphasized after the Kickstarter was simply, the taste.

We’d read so much about marketing and sales that we knew we needed to emphasize the USPs, or Unique Selling Points, of our ramen-- and that, to us, meant the vitamins, the minerals, and the macronutrient balance(protein wasn’t really a big thing back then yet).

Vitamins and Minerals. Yummy.

This worked well for our initial audience, where we’d cultivated a following through people who loved Soylent, a nutritionally complete drink, but worked less well for... anyone who wasn’t a huge nerd about nutrition.

Because, see, the problem was that healthy foods... are not well known for being especially delicious.

And there lies some of the biggest flaws of how we designed and communicated with food and nutrition.

First, we assumed that everyone who wanted to be healthy, would understand basic nutrition.

And second... We thought all food should taste as delicious as possible by default.

See, one of the hallmarks of autistic thinking is something called “bottom-up” thinking. For us, that meant starting with the pieces, understanding how they worked, and building our understanding from there.

If we wanted to eat healthier, then we wanted to know what actually made food healthy. What nutrients did we need? How much? What even is a nutrient?

If we're made of carbon, then diamonds are a nutrient, right?

And when it came to that word “healthy,” we’d assumed everyone else thought like that too! Start from the basics of understanding what “healthy” even is, build up the foundational nutrition knowledge for it, have a strong knowledge base about calories, macronutrients, and vitamins & minerals before anything else.

What we discovered was something entirely and wildly different.

People liked fast fixes. People wanted instant wins, miracle foods, and that “one simple thing to cut out” that would somehow fix their lives.

Precious few people learned about “healthy” in the way that we built our ramen. Vitamins and minerals? Macronutrient balance?

That took too much learning, too much time. To us, it was the right way, but to most, especially on an internet full of snake oil salesmen and miracle claims, it wasn’t something that interested them.

We’d assumed the shorthand of "Nutritionally complete, all vitamins and minerals” would’ve been context enough for everyone to understand all of the benefits that our ramen could provide.
But even worse, we made the critical mistake of assuming that food, by default, even “healthy” foods, should be tasty.

We’d been lucky, born of parents that were great cooks, and loved food as much as we did. We never really understood why other kids thought vegetables were gross, since the vegetables we were cooked always tasted great.

“Delicious” was something that we thought was the bare minimum bar to clear, before “healthy” even entered the equation.

And so, because of those two false assumptions, we’d put the unique selling point, the nutritionally complete aspect of it at the front, and thought people would understand the rest.

Bold, bright colors, minimalistic design, a logo, and the promise of being nutritionally complete, and we should’ve been distinctive enough to be remembered, right?

Once, I was at a dinner party with a distant relative, and someone brightened when they heard what I did.

“Oh, I’ve heard of you!” they’d exclaimed, “You’re Kevin! I’ve seen your ads about your ramen everywhere!”

I raised an eyebrow.

“I’m uh, not Kevin.” I paused for a moment, deciding how to handle this. “In these ads... did you ever see swords, or catboys?”

They blinked at that, confused.

“I don’t think so. Just your ramen. Bright colors and high protein, right?”

“Yeah, so... that’s not our ramen.”

The rest of the dinner party was awkward with that person, but I didn’t really care. The conversation had stuck with me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

That company wasn’t the only ones making high protein ramen now-- many others had cropped up here and there, and they had all taken pages from our book, studied us in depth.

I don’t believe that there should be a monopoly on ramen, and I personally liked having a lot of different brands to eat.

But, being a small business without venture capital, we were beginning to get buried beneath the avalanche of investor money that wiped us from the mind of potential customers altogether.

Something they don’t tell you about design is that when you’re preparing for launch, you’re not under that same kind of pressure. You have a clean slate to work from, and no existing product to worry about.

But when the business is up and running, and every day you’re dealing with new problems, new decisions, and the momentum of a brand that’s existed for a decade...

It becomes very, very difficult to do anything but small changes.

We tried to take pictures of bowls, we changed our website, we tried more esoteric phrases, we tried simpler copy... But nothing quite worked, or caught on the way we wanted it to, because we never had the time to change everything all at once.

Fundamentally, our design was still bright, bold colors, minimalistic background, and after all of these years... just like all the rest.

One day, a clip wandered across my feed. “How do they always make anime food look so good?” the caption said, as the auto-play of the algorithm showed me a highlight reel of brightly colored, illustrated food.

The gears started turning. We’d partnered with Vtubers before, where we’d made adjustments to our normal packaging design, coming up with brand new ones to fit their lore and the custom illustrations they’d given us.

But we’d never actually done anything of the like for ourselves.

Despite having cooked on the line at a Michelin Star restaurant before starting all this, I’d never really quite done a lot of food photography. I could plate well, but when pictures got involved... it always felt like the bowls represented in the photos never quite lived up to what they were in real life, somehow, and never quite meshed with the minimalistic design language we’d had.

Even as I commissioned the artwork for an upcoming flavor, Woodland Umami Mushroom, I began to think.Vite had been built on a foundation of creativity and passion, of being ourselves and having the conviction to remain so. And yet, somehow, the packaging that we had was still built from the era of thinking about what others wanted.
And it had, indeed, eventually made us just like everyone else too.

But...

What if, for one of our upcoming patch notes, we’d do something new?

What if, for v3.1...

We’d try something we’ve never done before, and fully commit to changing the packaging?

My mind lit up with ideas.

It was food, after all-- and I knew how to work with food, make it beautiful from the days I’d worked plating Michelin Star arrangements. Adding an illustrated bowl, that would work, but what about the rest surrounding it?

We could look at the packaging like a plate, then, the typography as garnishes, the color like sauce, and--

I started writing, and researching, and putting all of my ideas on paper, and one morning, breathlessly, excitedly presented it to the team.

“...I don’t really get it.”

I blinked.

“What don’t you get about it?”

“Kind of... everything.”

We tried anyway. Then I remembered, we wanted to add benefits, features to it as well-- another plating element, another typography thing to put in the packaging. I wanted the colors to be like sauce, or splashes of paint, representing that creative nature. I wanted the swooshes, the dots, the powder sprinkled over and the garnishes tweezered on and ingredients set carefully with the offset spatula and crowned with the illustrated bowl of ramen, and--

v3.1 research moodboard

“Tim, we can’t keep revising it.”

I stared at the packaging we had, eyes heavy with dark circles beneath them.

“There’s only a few days before--”

“Yeah. I know.” I paused, and took a deep breath. “Alright.”

“Send it.”

I’d failed.

It wasn’t bad, by any means. It worked, it had its own quirkiness to it, a charm of its own, but it didn’t carry that intentional language of plating that I’d so badly wanted. Maybe, once upon a time, I’d had that ability, I was able to plate, but...

The finished packets

To convey that skill to packaging, to communicate it somehow to someone else who’d never slid a spoon across a plate to get that perfect line of sauce...

But we had to launch, and I was still trying to figure out how to explain what I could see so clearly in my head.

We’d tried a redesign of the Naked Noods packaging too, then, going from the original cream colored window packaging to a bright robin blue with similar results. Closer, and yet, once again... we ran out of time, and I just couldn’t communicate exactly what I wanted.

And another time, for Chinese New Years and the story of that, to express my heritage and history more, communicate its importance in how I perceived food--

Closer. And once again, ran out of time.

The design we had the most drastic changes across.

The desire to be known at a glance, and to be understood, I think, is something that runs fiercely in most people. But, perhaps to those of us who have autism, and have spent all of our lives being constantly misunderstood and misinterpreted, it means just a little more. We have a tendency to speak more directly, and our directness gets twisted and misinterpreted into things we didn’t mean, and we take things more literally, and miss social cues, and shy away from social settings, lest we face the frustrations and shames of being misunderstood, again.

If we are to be judged by the cover of our books, or in this case, our packaging, then we want this cover to truly be us, and convey all that we are and can be, in a glance, and not be misunderstood.

And so, for our 10th anniversary, we’re trying something new, this time, something a little different.

This time, I want to ask you what our new designs convey to you.

This time, I want to understand what you understand from the packaging.

Because, if you’ve read this far... then thank you. You’ve spent the time to read all of this, dove beneath the surface, and understood, perhaps, just a little more about who we are.

So, I invite you to take a look at our new Vite Naked Noods packaging, and help us understand what you see.
What catches your eye first? What does it make you expect from the noodles inside?
Before you read the patch notes below, take a moment to look. I know what I wanted to put into the design, but I’d like to know what message made it through.

VITE NAKED NOODS PACKAGING PATCH NOTES v3.2:

• Vite Naked Noods name is back instead of Vite noodles
  • The AI email filters finally figured out the difference between “nudes” and “noods” which is probably bad news for some of you
  • Naked Noods was the better name anyway because people know a naked noodle means it doesn’t come with anything else
  • At least we hope people know what naked means please be smarter than AI we’re begging here
• Center brick was too bricked up so we used a shrink ray on it for better visual balance
• It now glows
  • please don’t ask why
  • We’re legally allowed to say but the Others will be very cross with us if we do
• Font characters got over their dark hard edgy phase
  • dark hard outlines on fonts removed in favor of subtle drop shadows
  • call that character development
  • something people struggle with understanding with media literacy nowadays
• Thinner fonts used for a classier feel
• Wiped the paint flecks off the bag
  • look it was hard to not spill stuff everywhere okay that’s a lot of triangles and the sun was in my eyes and i didn’t get enough sleep and my qi pathways were misaligned and venus is in retrograde and there was cat hair in my nose and
• Lines that show features included
  • thinking about swapping the kansui/quinoa+wheat position tho
  • apparently just seeing the word quinoa makes people think it’s fancier, which i still find weird
• new indicator of how many noods per bag
  • legal said we couldn’t say 6-7 noods
  • "was it legal or was it just me?" -Eris, as she reads this
  • but if you get 6 packs and a 9 pack of ramen--
• new line of features, like “never fried”
  • unlike my brains after designing and writing all this