Eggland’s Best, LLC, the #1 egg brand in the United States, is responsible for selling millions of farm fresh, better tasting, nutrient-dense eggs every year. With a network of farms across the country and over 78,000 quality tests, keeping consistent, high quality standards is their top priority for their eggs, as well as their packaging.

With the large volume of eggs, one of the primary challenges the team at Eggland’s Best faces is the management of packing requirements: various regulations and labeling restrictions, packaging differences between states, varying artwork sizes and more. The New Jersey-based design team uses Hive to streamline this process.

We spoke with Matt Seubert, Director of Digital Marketing and Amanda Harrington, Senior Design Associate to discuss how finding Hive has helped their team automate the artwork design and routing process, saving them an average of nearly two months of work hours per year.

Outdated approval loops and cluttered inboxes

Before implementing Hive, the team faced significant challenges in managing their packaging artwork. The company relied heavily on a manual email approval process for artwork approvals and reviews. This involved multiple rounds of review with over a dozen various internal and external team members — such as marketing, compliance, and production — as well as external approvers. This inefficient system often led to delays, with team members waiting days or even weeks for feedback.

“The team was constantly inundated with emails, printing physical flats for sign-offs, scanning them back to digital, and keeping track of the latest versions of the packaging artwork could be painful,” Matt explained. The blend of physical and digital, as well as complexity, resulted in long email chains, delays, and impacted speed to market.

The design team at EB sought out to find a tool that could help manage all necessary steps in the artwork routing process in a timely manner that could allow approvers to view artwork from anywhere. While looking for a new system, they simultaneously worked with an agency partner who used Hive for marketing material approvals. After collaborating with the partner, they realized Hive met their goal of a completely automated system that could deliver both speed and the necessary attention to detail to meet EB’s quality standards. From there, they didn’t look back.

How the team manages package design artwork in Hive

The design team at Eggland’s Best adopted Hive in December 2023. Over the past eleven months, Eggland’s Best has developed a standardized workflow for managing artwork approvals. 

The process begins with Amanda, who’s in charge of all things packaging. The packaging team uploads the artwork into a Hive project. While each egg carton package design may go through several rounds of revisions with the suppliers before entering Hive, most of the approval process takes place in Hive.

The Eggland’s Best team uses Hive’s Proofing & Approvals to conduct all rounds of edits. The process includes multiple rounds of approvals, including checks by the USDA, to ensure compliance with regulations. The USDA looks for required text, such as net weight, egg grading (A, AA, etc.) as well as checking marketing claims. This allows products to receive and retain the USDA seal on pack.

Amanda set up automated notifications and a standardized workflow to facilitate timely approvals from various stakeholders, significantly reducing the time spent on email follow-ups communications and almost entirely eliminating the need to print and scan proofs for approvals.

“In our previous process, we would reach out via email to nudge, but now it’s just as easy as clicking a button,” says Amanda.

Managing a streamlined package design system

In the team’s workspace, projects are organized at an item level – either by stock keeping unit (SKU) or grouped with similar products. Each project has its own set of action cards with artwork approvals and edits. In Hive, tasks are called actions, and each card has the corresponding data, information, and assignee information. When all rounds are complete, however, the project and its associated actions create a record to serve as a source of truth for the final, approved artwork.

For example, over the past year the EB team has sought to change the way all package fronts talk about vitamins – helping to put better nutrition front and center on pack across hundreds of cartons.

With this campaign, each piece of artwork had to be updated. Hive allows the team to quickly and digitally route, revisit, re-edit and release artwork without losing any work in the process.

From manual to automatized: How Hive changed the game for Eggland’s Best

Introducing Hive has had a big impact on the EB team. By simplifying the artwork routing process, Eggland’s Best saves a significant amount of time – equivalent to the efforts of a full-time employee in half a year. This newfound efficiency has allowed the packaging and artwork team to focus on more creative tasks that drive the brand, instead of process, and ultimately boosting productivity overall.

Matt observed that Hive not only made approvals easier but also improved the balance between creating and routing artwork. Team members can now quickly find and refer to the materials they need while reducing the risk of errors and misunderstandings. “Having everything in one place has definitely helped us stay on top of things and freed the team up to focus on creating and engaging consumers to try, buy, and love Eggland’s Best eggs,” he noted.