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The Long Road to Certification; Designing & Testing Child-Resistant Packaging For Cannabis

by Dane Whitehurst on 02/26/2019 | 8 Minute Read

In this occasionally light-hearted account of the journey to gaining a certified child resistant package under the 16CFR1700 regulations, it may be easy to forget the importance of doing this job the right way. Children are wonderfully entertaining, frustratingly unpredictable and unknowingly delicate creatures. They are also our future and represent the legacy of all our own hopes and dreams. This project was dedicated to protecting them as best we could.

One of the things that makes any child-resistant test so difficult to pass is that kids by their very nature are inquisitive beings. It’s amazing how interested they are in a cardboard box and just how much they want to open it to find out what’s inside. Now imagine that the box is filled with sweet, delicious candy, but that the candy is in turn filled with a potent psychoactive narcotic. A curious child and controlled substances do not mix well, and there are plenty of sobering facts that help to maintain one’s focus when taking on challenges like this.

But it's a critical, necessary step, and one that we put a lot of time and consideration into when we were developing our own Duallok, a card-based child-resistant package.

According to the National Capital Poison Center, “Every year there are almost one million accidental poisons amongst children under six years of age in the US.”  That’s a lot of kids gaining access to things that they shouldn’t be. And when you take that number and consider that “two years after Colorado legalised the use of Marijuana, the state saw an average 34% increase in poison center cases per year amongst children,” it becomes clear that there is a need not only for better education in this area but for better packaging.

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The Child Test

This account begins on a cold winters’ morning in a pre-school classroom somewhere in the middle of New Jersey. I sat sipping my morning coffee with a mixture of curiosity and anticipation over the insights I was to gain from my first experience with child testing. Placing my hard work in the hands of pre-school children for 10 minutes, knowing they would be quietly encouraged to destroy it, filled me with an inevitable sense of foreboding.

Keegan (fictional name) fell into earshot long before I saw him. The roar as he stomped up the stairs and burst through the doors bedecked in karate apparel still haunts me. Barely able to sit in his chair, he had his first five minutes to explore and open the box freely. His more timid and pensive testing partner sat quietly and patiently, turning the box over, systematically searching for weak points.

Keegan didn't do this.

He immediately set about the box with teeth gnashing and limbs flailing. It was like a gladiatorial fight to the death, and this kid wasn’t about to lose. Keegan didn’t need the additional five minutes, or verbal instructions; his well-rehearsed brute force approach had worked beautifully.

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It was at this point I realized we had grossly underestimated the destructive powers of a four-year-old child. Seeing the soggy and ragged strips of cardboard torn from my once beautiful box, I realized there was work to be done and with some reluctance accepted that at the very least we would need a tear-resistant material of some kind.

We knew we didn’t want to use a proprietary tear-resistant material. To be competitive, we needed to develop a solution that was cheap and to ensure a flexible supply chain, one readily available throughout the globe. We set about testing different combinations of boards and laminates until we landed on a combination that could withstand the bite strength of even the most determined members of our team.

Sure enough, when we tested the revised design, the results were dramatically improved. But as we were to learn, fixing one thing doesn’t necessarily ensure success. The next few rounds of testing threw up a plethora of new and imaginative modes of attack. We explored all manner of techniques from scratching and tearing, to bashing, gnawing, chewing and even stomping on top of the box.

In these sessions, we learned that kids tend to follow the path of least resistance strategy. They seem to test for weak points systematically, and once they find something and are gifted a glimmer of hope, they redouble their efforts. In fact, the whole ten minutes of testing a box in this manner is a psychological rollercoaster and an insight into the tenacity of pre-school children. For the most determined, failure is not an option. They work in pairs, so there's an element of competition. This can mean that if one child gets into the box, then the likelihood of the second gaining access is significantly increased.

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A double fail is a huge blow when the primary aim is to pass at 90% in fifty tests, and you feel it like a punch in the gut if you are sat there watching it happen.

Another complicating factor is that children at this age vary in their personalities and abilities. They are also hugely unpredictable from one day to the next. Consequently, there are innumerable variables at play within these tests.

We did, however, observe some trends; girls seem predisposed to a careful and considered approach and make more of an effort to open the box (although not always the case). Boys are generally more aggressive and often begin trying to tear or bite the box at an earlier stage in the test. There also seems to be a sizable difference in the span of age ranges from the youngest at 42 months to the oldest at around 51 months. Older kids are stronger, smarter and more confident and it’s usually this group that poses a challenge when trying to keep them out.

Each issue uncovered during testing required a design intervention, a calculated fix for each problem. We experimented with different versions of almost all the elements that make up the box including; the cover design, tray design, multiple variations of the locking mechanism, glue panel position and size, different adhesives, different substrates and so on.

On occasion, we managed to fix multiple issues with a single revision. For instance, we had seen in some tests that the ends of the tray were being torn out using a combination of teeth and fingers and that the same area was also susceptible to crushing if stamped on. The solution we created was a reinforced triangular section extending from the plastic locking tab wrapped into the beam at each end of the tray. It represented a marginal increase in material usage and labor within the assembly process but an immense improvement in strength. We ran mechanical tests in the studio, and the results showed a 3-400% improvement against the old design. Sure enough, when we retested, the results were very encouraging.

Another area that required experimentation was maximizing the bond strength between the adhesive and the substrate. In the end, we increased the surface area of the glue panel and trialed a large number of different adhesives and glue patterns until we found something that was stable and consistently robust. Finally, we had a design that was strong enough to beat the kids. Now we had to ensure that it was intuitive and z to open for the senior panel.

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The Senior Test

Senior citizens are an entirely different proposition when it comes to testing. Mercifully, they have good attention spans, but on the flip side, they have less time to open each package. In the first test, they have five minutes to open and close the box, with an additional minute to successfully repeat the process. They are asked to follow the guidance (if any) printed on the package and follow the steps to open it. If they can do it, they are then required to close it successfully.

The second part may seem straightforward, but we observed other tests run in parallel to ours where a plastic bottle lid had to be tightened to a certain torque before the child-resistant feature activated, and by no means were all accurately closed.

Luckily, although perhaps helped by experience in designing user-friendly and intuitive packaging for the pharmaceutical sector, when it came to the senior trials it was more about fine-tuning the printed opening instructions than considering any fundamental redesign of the physical packaging.

Our first iteration was about using as little in the way of printed guidance as possible. We wanted to understand how well the product semantics performed and how naturally intuitive the package would be to open. This would give us a reading on how much more explicit we would need to be with any printed guidance.

We produced sticky labels for the early tests that could be added to each package to increase the level of instructional information incrementally. This helped us to dial-in the point at which most people could understand how to operate the box.

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We found that there were two significant considerations with seniors. The first was linking up the steps within the opening process. "Squeeze size buttons" and "push here’" were printed on the area of the tray that is pressed to open the pack. Although simple, this carefully worded instruction does a lot of heavy-lifting; it tells people that there are two buttons, that they are on the sides of the box and that they both need to be depressed while the tray is being pushed out. Every word within the sentence gets considered, and the de-cluttered aesthetic helps to subconsciously define people’s perception of their physical interaction with the product.

The second important consideration was directing people to the precise area of the package that required their interaction. We began with the word ‘push’ over each button, but this caused some people to press the printed word, rather than the buttons beneath it. To remedy the problem, we included an arrow pointing to each button to make them more obvious and this simple addition fundamentally reduced the failure rate.

The final challenge in the design process was in fine-tuning the design to pass both the senior and child panel. The difficulty at this stage is that if you make a package more mechanically difficult to open for the kids, it also becomes more difficult for the seniors. Similarly, if you make a package more obvious to open for the seniors, then it may become more readily apparent for the kids.

It’s a fine balancing act, and only those who have been through this somewhat exhausting process will fully appreciate.