At a farmers market you get to talk. You hand somebody a sample, you tell them where the peppers come from, you answer the question about heat level. On a shelf you get none of that. You get about two seconds, from four feet away, next to competitors, under bad lighting.
Most packaging for small food brands is designed as if the conversation is still happening.
The two second test
Stand your product on a shelf, back up four feet, and look at it for two seconds. Can you tell what it is? Can you tell whose it is? Can you tell why it is different from the thing beside it? If any of those take longer than two seconds, that is the problem, and no amount of social media fixes it.
The most common failure is the label that has everything on it. Founder story, sourcing, awards, recipe suggestion, tagline. Each one is nice. Together they are noise, and noise reads as generic from four feet away.
"Four feet back, two seconds. What it is, whose it is, why it is different."
Design for the shelf you are going on
Go stand in the store you want to be in and photograph the section. What color is everything already? If the whole set is kraft paper and earth tones, another kraft paper label disappears. If the set is loud, quiet might be the differentiator.
This is the part that gets skipped, because it is much easier to design in a vacuum and much more satisfying to look at a render on a white background. Renders lie. Shelves do not.
What the buyer sees in your packaging
Buyers read packaging as a proxy for whether you will need help selling. A product that explains itself moves without demos, without shelf talkers, without them doing anything. A product that needs a conversation is a product that needs their labor.
That is why packaging is frequently the highest return investment in marketing for food and beverage brands. It works in the buyer meeting and it works on the shelf afterward, which is not true of most things you can spend money on.
One practical note
Get the regulatory pieces right before you print. Net weight, ingredients, allergens, nutrition where required. A design that has to be reprinted because a required element was missed is an expensive lesson, and it always seems to happen on the first big run.