Big Food, Small Food
If this hasn't happened to you lot, make information technology happen. Go to a shiny modern retail store almost you, and stroll the juice shelves. Your center is caught by a glass bottle with a metal cap, a mini-replica of the milk bottles of your youth. Yous take in the charmingly 'un'-designed bottle.
Austere titling identifies the grass-dark-green juice as cold-pressed Mojoberry, wild-sourced, and full of natural antioxidants. Mixed simply with spring water, information technology promotes healthy metabolism, and is plucked by Melgrovian gatherer communities. Similar it? Yep, specially when you acquire that 1% of gross sales go to keep the intellectual property rights within the forester groups.
Peradventure nosotros take reached a bespeak where information technology may be incumbent on every nutrient business concern to locate itself on an ethical spectrum, even if its product is 100% manufactured, and synthesized entirely from the purest chemicals. Deep Design probes the phenomenon and salutes with both a nod and a flash, the body of water of new brands that concern themselves with bettering the human condition.
In a sense, it was always thus.
For selling food has always been well-nigh health and trust; no purchase or sale has greater consequence. If the last century of food is partly near packaged convenience, then it'due south besides almost its malcontents—processing to raise sense of taste, texture and shelf-life often achieved at the price of lower food density.
Health/ethical brands can be viewed equally a cosmetic to modernity, arising from the body of club, using modernity against itself, and running contemporaneously with it. Equally illustration, consider the human trunk, which can makes antibodies confronting pathogens, and hormones to digest a range of foods. It is exquisitely evolved to fight or adapt, and both the stressors and their anti-stressors go back many aeons.
Health / ethical brands can be viewed equally a corrective to modernity, arising from the body of society, using modernity confronting itself, and running contemporaneously with information technology.
Similar the illustration, the opposition has evolved along with the mainstream it seeks to correct. As early as the 1930s, Robert Bootzin (1914-2004, also 'Gypsy Boots'), an early icon of fitness and natural living in America, lived with other 'tribesmen' in caves, wore long pilus, and lived off seasonal fruit. A media figure, he likely opened the door to alternate living, California style: yoga, vegetarianism, abstinence and organic food. The championship of his cult volume, 'Bare Feet and Good Things to Eat,' says it all.
Nutrient processing, new materials and manufacturing (plastics and aluminum), and new distribution formats are by themselves, merely mod enablements. What turns them into the sort of profound, discontinuous modify that characterizes 20th century modernity is that they serve the large food companies which have changed what nutrient means. Nutrient is no longer local, and we are distanced from the growers; nosotros consume brands and variants, not varieties. It is hardly perishable, tastier than nature could manage and standardized. Its critics call it Big Food.
Accordingly, Large Food's packaging, and that of its followers, stresses a kind of screaming, base attractiveness, optimized for the shelf, and conveyed through images that strain to detail (un?)natural perfection, apart from corporate reliability.
As with bodily stressors, Big Food is resisted by multiple antigens: local food, slow food, organic food, sustainable farming. Allow's call it Small Nutrient. Acting in concert are new-age spirituality, fair trade, the rise in status of traditional knowledge, multiculturalism, and the public scrutiny that'south a feature of the cyberspace age.
Tying some of these strands together is a lurking distrust of the establishment, comprising government, corporations, media and sections of intelligentsia. It is seen by critics as a dare of interests and opinion: purchase, eat, and be happy. Large Nutrient is compared to Big Tobacco, and even nutrient science is suspected of commissioned research.
These perennial themes suggest the ways in which Pocket-sized Nutrient packages itself. A whole taxonomy of blueprint approaches offers a rage of antidotes. The folksy strand takes the ideal of artisanship to an delightful extreme: paw lettering and intricate, irregular shapes. They stress their distant, wild, sources, often with carefully enunciated 'ethnic' values. Another kind professes to be a medieval or modern apothecary, a herbalist, who has merely labelled his potions in the plainest of packs. Then at that place are the sciency types, stealing a leaf from the multinational playbook with a pristine, minimal laboratory chic. Mojoberry, in paragraph 1, might well be an amalgam of all of these.
Perennial themes in Heath/Ethical brands — a range of antidotes. The folksy strand: paw lettering, intricate, irregular shapes, the medieval or modern apothecary strand: plain labels, and the science-y kind with a pristine, minimal laboratory chichi.
Common to all of these is an ethical approach to identity. Sources are all of import to nutrient, only the logic of manufacture, scale and standardization makes authentic origins difficult to claim for Large Food. Small Food exploits this weakness and paints itself as a person or community you can know, and thus claims a kind of personal authenticity. Trader Joe, as a name exploits this: remember that Pocket-size Food isn't necessarily all that small as business.
Each of these design styles implies a claim to innocence of marketing, branding and commercial slickness: the herbalist, scientist and local grower all strive to announced artless. Patanjali'due south gauche packaging has been claimed to fuel its stupendous rise; on the other paw, the super successful brand Innocent is an archetype of an extremely artful candor.
Patanjali'south gauche packaging has been claimed to fuel its stupendous ascent; on the other manus, the super successful make Innocent is an archetype of an extremely aesthetic artlessness.
It is now possible to look at these healthful heroes with a cynical eye, every bit the ethical bandwagon seems every bit full of pretenders as any other. Has the antibody started to resemble a virus, which the allowed system cannot notice? If so, Big Food can launch or acquire ethical brands. Peachy bodies coopt small ones to survive: our cells evolved from simple bacteria.
Bite by bite, sip past sip, Modest Food's positive antagonism might still strengthen the nutrient trade, making it more transparent, fair and wholesome. At least we tin can hope: lookout man those packs carefully.
Illustration Credits: Niloy Kundu
Published past permission of the author. Showtime published in a slightly modified course 'Big Food, Small Food' in Business Standard, 17 February, in Deep Design, a monthly column past Itu Chaudhuri.
A principal at ICD who writes broadly on design, taking in connected subjects. He sometimes offers a way of thinking about problems clients may be facing, and sometimes proposes new bug. Chaudhuri promises not to say 'blueprint thinking' unless it's in a takedown.
Published in Packaging South Asia August 2018.
Link to Itu Chaudhari's blog http://icdindia.com/
Source: https://packagingsouthasia.com/supply-chain-function/design-marketing/big-food-small-food/
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