This Lunar New Year, many boxes filled with tea leaves, pastries and other gourmet food items will exchange hands. But the gift givers don’t just want to please their recipients’ palates. They also want to make a statement.
Gift sets are traditionally given during major holidays. While most come in simple red cardboard boxes, consumers have become increasingly demanding about packaging and designers are working hard to give them more options.
Selecting a gift is now viewed as “a form of personal expression,” says James Chen (陳進東), the head of Magic Creative (麥傑創意團隊), which was one of 10 Taiwanese companies to win Red Dot Design Awards last year for food packaging designs, twice as many as in 2010.
Photo courtesy of Bonho
Consumers can chose from boxes that can be turned into festive paper lanterns, unfolded into jewelry boxes or converted into snack trays. Many gift sets are decorated with motifs and colors inspired by Chinese and Taiwanese culture.
“When people select a gift set, they want to represent their own taste,” says Chen, who founded Magic Creative in 1993. “Even if they are giving something small, like cakes and candy, they still pay attention to the packaging.”
Green in Hand (掌生穀粒) founder Cheng Yun-yi (程昀儀) says package design is a “very important form of communication.”
Photo courtesy of Green In Hand
“From the beginning, we focused on how it can represent our culture and encourage consumers to embrace something different,” says Cheng, who worked in advertising before starting Green in Hand in 2006.
Green in Hand’s specialty is rice grown in Taiwan using sustainable farming methods and selected for the quality of its shape, texture and taste. The staple food is not usually given as a gift, however, and the company had to figure out how to compete with specialty food items.
“Our plan was to turn Taiwanese farmers’ products into Taiwanese farmers’ works of art,” says Cheng.
Photo courtesy of Magic Creative
The company’s first packaging featured sheets printed with Chinese calligraphy wrapped around bags made from brown kraft paper. Other packages have been made from lushly patterned Taiwan floral cloth or gleaming satin brocade with dragons woven in gold metallic thread.
Its focus on packaging has helped the company thrive: last year it sold about 8.2 tonnes of rice (most of Green in Hand’s packages contain 300g to 1.5kg of the grain.)
Like Green in Hand, Orientea (茶籽堂) also relies on packaging to market a traditional product. The company, which has sold dish soap and laundry detergent made with tea since 1992, recently launched a line of tea seed oils.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
Pressed from the seeds of camellia oleifera (苦茶) flowers, tea seed oil was once frequently used in Taiwan for cooking and skin care, but is now considered old-fashioned. Orientea hopes to convince younger customers to buy the oil for personal use or gift giving.
“A lot of younger people don’t even know what tea seed oil is and how it can be used,” says Orientea head Wood Chua (趙文豪). “It’s important to emphasize a cultural connection. We want shoppers to remember ‘my mother or grandmother used this oil’ and be curious about its benefits.”
The oil’s packaging is meant to convey a sense of warmth and hominess. Bottles are wrapped in paper printed with sketches of farmers who grow the company’s supply of camellias.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
“Our customers want to see their own ideals reflected in the packaging,” says Chao. “They purchase our oil because they want to know more about Taiwanese culture or get to know the farmers who produced it and where the tea seeds were grown.”
Magic Creative’s gift boxes for Jiu Zhen Nan (舊振南), a 120-year-old Kaohsiung-based traditional pastry maker, also emphasize a strong cultural connection.
Curio boxes collected by Chinese emperors inspired the company’s award-winning design, which was created for the 2010 Mid-Autumn Festival. It unfolds to reveal eight compartments in rich colors and can be reused as storage for small items like jewelry.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
“Every year there are always a lot of moon cake boxes discarded,” said Chen. “Our boxes can be used over and over again, which emphasizes the value of the brand.”
Like Jiu Zhen Nan’s gift boxes, Bonho’s (寶號) packaging for its Taiwan Centennial Blessing Tea (百年賜喜茶禮) set was also designed to have multiple uses.
The four boxes included in the gift set are covered with different laser-cut designs based on traditional Chinese wooden window screens and turn into paper lanterns when small lights are switched on. Bags of tea leaves and square ceramic cups with auspicious Chinese characters molded onto their bottom surfaces are nestled in each box. When they are filled with tea, the condensation that collects on each cup leaves an impression on table surfaces like a seal dipped in red ink.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
Bonho’s gift set has placed in seven design competitions, including the Red Dot Design Awards, Good Design Award and iF Packaging Design Award. The company plans to expand its offerings to pastries and coffee beans grown in Taiwan.
“Our goal is to offer consumers a very clear visual concept,” says Bonho managing director Kristy Wen Ho (何文).
“Everything is very carefully planned,” Ho adds. “We want our products to represent the best of Taiwan.”
TREAT YOURSELF
Consumers who purchase specialty food products for their own use instead of gift giving are also a growing market segment. Willis Huang (黃致瑋), the brand development product manager of Good Cho’s (好,丘), says the challenge that packaging designers face is convincing shoppers to buy tea leaves, condiments or snacks that are sometimes twice as expensive as their mass-market counterparts.
Good Cho’s customers “care about quality of life and aesthetics,” says Huang. “They have high standards for what they purchase and they want to try things that are different from what they can find in supermarkets.” The Xinyi District store carries food items made from ingredients grown locally without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. (Orientea and Good in Hand are among the 30 brands sold in the store.)
Many of the store’s young patrons are environmentally conscious and Huang encourages brands to avoid using exterior boxes or shrink-wrapping.
Treasure Tea’s (無藏) reusable metal canisters have brightly colored, lively illustrations of Alishan tea plantations.
Muchorganic’s (牧蟲園有機農場) bottles of fruit vinegar catch the eye because their design is unusually stark. With their bold typography and simple labels, the bottles would look at home on the shelves of upscale Western supermarket chains like Whole Foods and Waitrose.
Many companies target shoppers who live on their own or in small households without children. News & Market (上下游), for example, sells simple paper packages filled with just enough baking mix to whip up one batch of cookies or biscuits.
While many brands feature Taiwanese motifs in their packaging, like Taiwan floral cloth or the country’s silhouette, Huang says that designers are now becoming even more specific in establishing a local identity.
For example, Gogo Best Food’s (福忠字號) sauces feature colorful illustrations of street scenes in military dependents’ villages. The condiments, which include flavors like Sichuan-style mala hot sauce, are based on recipes from women who lived in the villages.
Package designs are now “emphasizing exactly where their ingredients are grown, like Taichung or Puli, and what makes that area special,” says Huang.
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