Never Go Grocery Shopping With A Packaging Industry Professional!
Seriously, though, there is no better way to discover new trends and products in packaging than to scour the landscape of retail outlets. As we wander down the aisles of the local supermarket or in between the pallet racks in big box stores, we tend to become captivated by package design, especially new and unique ones.
We notice that the pallets of products on the top tier of the pallet rack have been stretch wrapped by a Pallet Wrapper. We take note that the 24 Pack of Toilet Paper is not in a cardboard carton, but rather a shrink wrap bundle.
We wonder how we would fill a particular product. Would an overflow filler work, or do we need a pump filler or a piston filler. We visualize the filling and how much time it would take to fill the bottle or container.
We turn our attention the cap, noting if it is a screw cap, a snap cap, a lug cap or a plug and wonder how it gets from the floor level and on to the product. We wonder if there is a foil seal underneath the cap and whether it was applied by an induction sealer or a conduction foil sealer. It registers with us that the product has a tamper evident band on it.
Our gaze is captured by product labeling and their various forms: shrink wrap label, pressure sensitive label, glue label, wrap label, panel label, neck labeling, and date coding. Living, breathing proof that creativity is the final frontier of the human experience.
We are reminded about what we know whilst meandering about in the places where the rubber literally hits the road. Where the finished product meets the shopping cart. We can remember our visits to plants where liquid packaging lines are cranking out products at 2,000 bottles per minute. We reflect on our stop to see the entrepreneur whose boutique olive oil is being filled and capped with "tabletop", manual and semi-automatic machines at 10 bottles per minute.
We notice these things. Things that are obviously not critical to our companions focused on checking items off of the shopping list. But it's unavoidable for us. All we can do is to recognize the blank stares or eyes glazing over of our partners in shopping when they mutter under their breath, " well, that's good to know".
Posted: January 29, 2010
Web Site Design and Application Development by Morgan Source