When Hillsboro, KS-based Golden Heritage Foods LLC heard the buzz about DreamWorks Animation's feature film, Bee Movie, it jumped at the chance to create a bee-themed promotional package for its honey.

Purchases made at hardware, home-improvement, and automotive stores usually are planned, measured transactions. Wrench Mints, from the Los Angeles, CA-based company of the same name, attempts to break the mold and bring impulse buying to those store channels with a tin-plate container of breath fresheners.

Shape works with the Wrench Mints brand name to sell the product. Both the tin-plate container and the mints resemble the look of a wrench. Eddy Rubin, President and CEO of Wrench Mints, conceived the idea for the product and packaging.

Holding 35 to 42 miniature mints, the silver container is manufactured by an unnamed company in Hong Kong. The pack measures 3.7" x 1.5" x 0.45" and has a suggested retail price of $1.99. After the mints are gone, the container doubles as a holder for hardware fasteners such as nails and screws.

The mints have been introduced in the Peppermint and Cinnamon varieties, with more on the way this year.

In Germany, Lambertz gains elegance on the store shelf with ebony-colored, rounded-corner tins for its premium Best Selection brand of chocolate biscuits. With a crackle finish, the tins emulate the look of rich leather.

A common consumer complaint in bakery products is that the containers are often awkward to carry. Frequently the cartons risk collapse or bend and damage the delicate bakery goods inside unless consumers balance the package in their hands as they carry it.

Betta Foods, an Australian manufacturer of ice cream cones and specialty confectionery products, is adding convenience to candy packaging with a resealable zipper on its Natural Real Fruit Flavored Liquorice AllSorts and Liquorice Bullets varieties.

"The benefit of a resealable feature is twofold, says "John Roumelle, Marketing Manager at Betta Foods. "It serves as a visual differentiating factor at point of purchase and it allows our brands to stand out based on the added convenience."

Working with Zip-Pak, Betta Foods adds the zipper to a BOPP/CPP pouch with a trapped print lamination. The packages are flexo-printed in eight colors.

According to Zip-Pak, the zipper costs about .125 cent on a 6"-wide package, compared with 12¢ to 15¢ for comparable food storage bags.

Betta Foods, an Australian manufacturer of ice cream cones and specialty confectionery products, is adding convenience to candy packaging with a resealable zipper on its Natural Real Fruit Flavored Liquorice AllSorts and Liquorice Bullets varieties.

Plastic containers with handles have recently elevated convenience in the sugar aisle, which has been home to paper sacks for decades. In Canada, here is how another marketer improves convenience in sugar packaging.

The Wm. Wrigley Co. challenged its Marketing Department to increase consumption among loyalists of the company’s Eclipse chewing gum.

When I'm around great packaging, I turn into a giddy geek. My wife says I act like a little boy who finds a morbid joy in zapping ants with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. That’s why I connected quickly with the Little Learners Bug Catcher—I immediately “got it.”

The Little Learners Bug Catcher turns into a highly functional toy after the “dirt” and bug candy are consumed, and kids “get it” right away on the shelf. The package’s primary appeal is neon green worms and fire engine red ants flexo-printed on a transparent PVC shrink label. It is obvious to any adolescent boy that the gummy worms and ants packed inside are digging through chocolate cookie meal “dirt.”

What pushes the food-grade PET container over the top is its polypropylene lid holding two hinged magnifying glasses. After kids eat the spade-shovel portion of “dirt” in one overstuffed mouthful and play with and then eat the worms and ants, the container becomes a holding pen for bugs, grubs and spiders.

Consumer and market research firm Mintel noted two significant packaging trends in chocolate confectionery products during the first six months of 2005. The newest one is co-branding, the combination of two brands into one product, often from the same company, as well as the extension of a brand from one category into the chocolate confectionery sector. This tactic enables multiple products under the same corporate umbrella to gain some enhancement on a single package.

Here’s one recent example. Hershey has introduced Twosomes Limited Edition Candy Bars with Health Toffee bits, and Hershey’s TwoSomes with Whoppers. The candy comes in a 1.4-oz flexible package.

For years, consumers have requested more functional packaging for sugar. Now, marketers are listening. To satisfy legions of consumers who demand convenience, some sugar marketers are complementing their longstanding paper bags by delivering sugar in resealable stand-up pouches and rigid containers.

Imperial Sugar of Sugar Land, TX, is at the forefront of this trend with two new packages. One of them is a bottom-gusseted stand-up pouch with a resealable zipper. The pouch holds 54 oz of sugar. It’s an adhesive lamination of polyester and low-density polyethylene from Cello-Foil Products, and is reverse-printed gravure in six colors.

Consumers told Imperial Sugar that they prefer the pouch instead of paper bags because the pouch is leakproof and resealable. “First, consumers will make more frequent repeat purchases of the pouch because of its convenience and size,” says Art Saxby, Imperial Sugar Vice President of Marketing. “Second, the pouch won’t tear and leak all over the floor.”

A second new package from Sugar Land puts brown sugar in pre-measured, 1-cup resealable containers assembled into three-packs and held together by a paperboard U-board and clear shrink film.

Links: Petro Packaging
Zaunscherb Marketing Inc.
InterPac

Yosha! Enterprises, seeking structural packaging inspiration for liquid mints, found it in the cosmetics aisle. The company’s approach takes two forms: First, a pocket-size foil pouch containing a tube that holds eight gelatin capsules filled with flavored liquid. Second, a “super tube” variety pack containing 15, eight-count tubes.

Zaunscherb Marketing drove the new design. Flex-printed foil pouches come from InterPac. Clear tubes with polypropylene caps from Petro Packaging address retailer demand for more dynamic packaging in category planograms.