A streamlined PET bottle for Kraft Foods' 50-plus salad dressings achieves a 19% reduction in weight over the previous packaging and also provides multiple consumer conveniences.

Here's a clever design in pouched microwavable heat-and-serve sauces and gravies. Royco sauces, from Master Foods, a division of Mars, in South Africa, are packaged in retorted pouches. Before microwave heating, the consumer snips the pouch corner for venting and pouring.

The challenge for third-generation DelGrosso Foods: Increase distribution to gourmet supermarkets and specialty food stores. The solution: The company developed ultra premium, natural Italian sauces, marketed under the La Famiglia DelGrosso brand name, and then introduced them in packaging that reflects both the quality ingredients and family pride vested in the products.

Increasingly, it appears that products with a strong focus on simple packaging resonate best with consumers. However, the trick for packaging is to provide a relatively complicated solution in a very simple way. It’s even better when the solution is a bit playful.

That’s the case with My Dolmio Creamy Tomato Sauce from Masterfoods. Sold in the U.K. and Ireland, My Dolmio pasta sauces come in single-serve stand-up pouches. Of course, in the United States we would never have a product that also requires consumers to prepare pasta as a simple after-school snack, but that concept seems to work in the U.K. Kids cut open the pouch, pop it into the microwave, heat, remove, and pour. That’s where simplicity comes in.

Two features on this pouch help ensure success for kids and teens. First, the pouch’s curved “pitcher” shape helps ensure that when the container is opened, the heated contents will be less likely to “spurt out.” Second is the playful part. A thumbprint and the copy say “Hold me from here.” The pouch’s seal is wider in this area so that kids and teens can grab it there without burning their fingers—the sealed portion stays cool.

What a fun and easy-to-use package!

- By Lynn Dornblaser, Mintel International From Package Design magazine

Look for compensating behaviors in your product users. That’s an axiom for good package design that’s making a buzz in marketing circles.

Heinz’s new Fridge Door Fit ketchup bottle grew out of this approach. Plenty of other untapped opportunities also await. Success may require examining not only compensating behaviors but also the cost of doing nothing.

Consider motor oil. Every vehicle owner changes their oil regularly. Motorists fall into one of two camps on oil regularly. Motorists fall into one of two camps on oil changes: Some are do-it-yourselfers while the rest of us patronize the neighborhood quick-lube garage.

Ronald deVlam has a great idea for a motor oil package for the D-I-Y crowd: a dual-chamber container. One chamber holds new oil and the other is a receptacle for used oil drained from the vehicle.

The extra chamber serves two purposes. First, it eliminates the inconvenience of emptying used oil into a separate container and taking it to a recycling center. Or worse, dumping it in the trash or into the soil. Second, consider a motor oil brand that doesn’t enjoy much distribution through oil-change shops. A value-added retail package may convert some consumers who patronize oil-change garages into D-I-Yers and loyalists of the forward-thinking brand.

The dual-chamber container would include room for a postage-paid label to ship the spent oil to a recycler. This same recycling approach has created a legion of brand loyalists for Hewlett-Packard printer cartridges.

Opportunities to win new customers abound when you look at the consumer as both a shopper and a product user.

- Jim George, Editor in Chief

The good-for-you message is proving to be a strong purchase motivator in food products, and ACH Food companies joins the parade with Mazola Pure. The package design, on a aluminum aerosol container from CCL Container, conveys the product attributes—pure aroma and taste.

Packaging in the cooking oil aisle has evolved little in recent years, but this package gives both the brand and the category a shot in the arm with a shapely aluminum container, nozzle, and lightly tinted cap. Bob Larkin, Manager of Packaging Development, says the package’s clean design and pearl finish communicate the taste, aroma, and product expectation.

The design contrasts the category’s conventional steel, three-piece, cylindrical-shaped cans.

Three microwavable aseptic-packaged sauces from Chef Creations are intended to attract time-pressed consumers who enjoy better foods with less preparation work.

Chef Creations offers alfredo sauce, hollandaise sauce, and a classic brown sauce in Tetra Wedge® containers from Tetra Pak. Chef Creations says the patented barrier-protection packaging protects the taste from spoiling while also offering the quick-meal solution of “microwave dining.”

Each package holds 6.75-oz of sauce, is shelf-stable, and protects the quality of the contents without the need for preservatives. Consumers can microwave the sauces right in the package, eliminating the step of pouring the sauce into a dish before heating in the microwave.

Link: Tetra Pak International USA

A label with distinctive styling adds excitement, curiosity, and intrigue to Mikey’s New York Steak Marinade, which is marketed in New York City.

Label designs depict the New York skyline and the colors recall the signage of the Ed Sullivan Theatre, as well as colors used in the New York State Lottery, says Michael Romano, Founder of Mikey’s Famous Marinades Corp.

The labels are pressure-sensitive semigloss paper, flexo-printed in five colors. A laminate protects the label from moisture and scuffing while adding luster.

Contributing to the package: Christopher Harri Design, Blue Ribbon Tag & Label, and Seal-It Inc.

Links: Blue Ribbon Tag & Label Seal-It Inc.

Marketers who keep abreast of packaging advances and understand when to use them have a leg up in the battle for shelf supremacy. Unilever Foods is one marketer that understands this dynamic and reflects it in the conversion of its flagship 32-oz Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar from glass to PET.

Unilever Foods had converted its 48- and 64-oz jars of Hellmann’s mayonnaise from glass to PET, but resisted in the 32-oz size. “Converting to PET is more economical in the larger sizes because the resin weight-per-unit volume decreases as you go up in size,” explains Vinod Bansal, Group Manager, Packaging Technology, Unilever Foods.

Then, Unilever Foods discovered Amcor PET Packaging’s two-step blow-and-trim technology. The high-volume process forms threads as containers are made rather than during the preform stage. Amcor’s higher-volume approach made the conversion to PET financially practical for the 32-oz jar, Bansal says.

Links: Tetra Pak

Valrhona, a French gourmet chocolate maker, wanted to enter the growing market for gourmet, ready-made dessert sauces in both retail and food service. Success required a ready-to-use package to protect the flavor and quality of its premium Sauce au Chocolat sauce. Valrhona chose Tetra Pak’s Tetra Wedge™ microwavable aseptic pouch.

The benefits of ready-to-serve and microwavable heating, along with the web-shaped pouch, present additional value to the brand’s customers. The pouch material includes polyethylene terephthalic silicon oxide.

The package is printed using flexography, in four colors plus black.