Packaging basics: what a pack has to do

A pack does five jobs at once, and people judge it by the one it does worst. It protects the product. It carries the information the law demands, at the size and in the place the law demands it. It has to be found, by a shopper walking past a shelf or by somebody scrolling a grocery app where the whole pack is a picture no bigger than a thumbnail. It has to sell, which means telling a stranger what this is and why they should pick this one. Then it has to be opened, used and thrown away or recycled without a fight. Beginners tend to design for selling alone, because selling is the only one of the five jobs that looks like graphic design on a screen.

Protection comes first because the product sets the terms. Crisps go stale or rancid if air and light get in, and a glass bottle has to survive a fall from a pallet. Those needs decide the structure, which is the shape of the pack, its material and the way the parts go together, and structure is paid for in tooling that is slow and expensive to change. Graphics are the printed surface, and they can change at the next print run for the cost of new plates. So settle the structure first. The Pringles tube is the best-known case of a structure becoming the brand. Fredric Baur, a Procter & Gamble chemist, filed the patent for the tube and for the method of stacking the curved crisps inside it in 1966, and it was granted in 1970. When he died in 2008, his children buried part of his ashes in a Pringles can, as he had asked npr.org.

The law mostly lives on the back of the pack, and it is specific about size and position as well as content. Food sold in the European Union has to carry a set list of information under Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 eur-lex.europa.eu, including the name of the food, the ingredients, a date mark, the net quantity, the business responsible and a nutrition declaration. The same regulation sets a minimum x-height of 1.2 mm for that text, or 0.9 mm where the largest surface is under 80 square centimetres, and it requires allergens to stand out in the ingredients list, which is why they usually appear in bold. In the United States the net quantity has to sit in the bottom 30 per cent of the principal display panel on most packs. India's labelling regulations of 2020 changed the non-vegetarian mark from a brown circle to a brown triangle, so that shoppers with colour blindness could tell it apart from the green vegetarian dot. Design the back first on anything regulated.

Being found comes before selling, and it happens before anybody reads a word. A shopper scans a shelf for a colour and a shape they already know, and a pack that has to be read before it can be recognised has usually lost them by then. Online it shrinks to a thumbnail. In 2018 researchers at the University of Cambridge's Engineering Design Centre and Unilever released guidelines for mobile ready hero images cam.ac.uk, after finding that different flavours and sizes of one product looked identical on a phone. Their answer is a simplified pack picture that keeps the brand, the product type, the variant and the size readable at that scale. The university's announcement cites a 24 per cent rise in sales of Magnum ice cream during an eight-week test.

The front of the pack does the selling. It has to tell a stranger what the product is, whose it is and which variant it is, in about the time it takes to walk past. Owned assets do the rest, and Toblerone shows how much a single one can carry. The Matterhorn had been on its boxes since 1970, and when Mondelez began moving some production to Slovakia in 2023, Switzerland's rules on national symbols meant the mountain had to come off. The replacement is a generic peak drawn in the same triangular style, with the hidden bear kept. Ranges add a second problem. A range has to look like one family from across an aisle and still let somebody pick the mild one over the hot one in a second, and the usual answer is to hold every element still except one device, most often a colour, that changes with each variant.

The last job starts after the sale. A pack has to open without scissors, close again if the product lasts a week, and then tell its owner which bin it belongs in. This is where sustainability is decided, mostly by structure, meaning how much material there is, how many layers it has and whether the parts come apart. The printed claims are the risky part. In January 2022 Keurig Canada agreed to pay a C$3 million penalty after the Competition Bureau found its claims that K-Cup pods could be recycled were false or misleading, since outside British Columbia and Quebec the pods were not widely accepted by municipal recycling programmes. The settlement also required changes to its packaging. In the EU, Directive (EU) 2024/825 eur-lex.europa.eu bans generic environmental claims such as eco-friendly or green unless the trader can show recognised excellent environmental performance, and member states apply it from 27 September 2026.

The work itself runs in an order that saves money. The maker of the pack supplies a dieline, the flat technical drawing with cut, fold and glue lines, and the artwork is built on that drawing. Ask for it before you design anything. Talk to the printer early as well, because they know what their press can hold on that material and which finishes can run together, and that knowledge is cheap at the sketch stage and expensive once artwork is final. Colour is approved on a proof printed on the real material, because a screen cannot show what ink does on brown board or clear film. Then make a rough mockup, give it to someone who has never seen the project, and watch them open it.