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- Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017
International Journal of Food Design - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017
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Selling food in clear packages: The development of cellophane and the expansion of self-service merchandising in the United States, 1920s–1950s
By Ai HisanoAbstractThis article examines how the increasing use of transparent packaging, specifically cellophane, and a new self-service merchandising system altered consumers’ sensory experiences in food purchasing. It focuses on the American food industry roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s, a time when self-service became the dominant way of selling perishable items in the country. Clear packages provided consumers with a new way of understanding product quality. At supermarkets, where meat was already cut and bread packaged, and where consumers rarely had a chance to actually taste, smell or touch foods, they needed to rely mostly on visual information in selecting products. Businesses’ effort to capture consumer desire facilitated the creation of a new kind of visual regime, which rested on commercial intent, gendered narratives and technological manipulation, in the rise of consumer capitalism from the early twentieth century. By emphasizing the significance of colour in food consumption, retailers created food products and store interiors intended to stimulate female consumers’ chromatic sensation and their appetite for food purchasing.
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Permitted and pure: Packaged halal snack food from Southwest China
More LessAbstractChina is home to ten groups of Muslims comprising at least twenty million people. The largest of these groups, the Chinese Muslim Hui people, have benefitted from China’s rapid economic growth in the past three decades just like their non-Muslim fellow citizens. Along with the highly visible new mosques being built in Hui communities across China, Hui economic vitality is noticeable in the burgeoning halal food industry, from five-star restaurants to street kiosks, special sections in supermarkets devoted to halal products and most recently in the e-commerce market. This article examines the packaging of halal beef jerky produced and marketed specifically for that e-commerce market, as an example of the religious, social and economic vitality of Hui in Yunnan Province in southwestern China in the post-Mao era. The packages adhere to successful strategies employed by marketing designers, and they purposefully combine faith-based and traditional Chinese cultural themes and motifs with the kind of detailed product information and quality certification demanded by consumers in China and around the world who want quality food products that might also bring a sense of nostalgia, and have the disposable income to buy those products in online shopping venues.
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Telling stories: The role of graphic design and branding in the creation of ‘authenticity’ within food packaging
More LessAbstractFood is increasingly sold with a story, and the majority of those writing about the branding process within industry agree that this story should be ‘authentic’; a ‘true’ representation of a brand’s value or personality. Across the broader field of branding, ‘authenticity’ has become key to a product’s marketing. However, much of the language used to describe and market food is very difficult to define or standardize – terms such as ‘local’, ‘quality’, ‘authentic’ and ‘premium’ remain confusing for the customer. Furthermore, in the context of branding and marketing, multiple genres of authenticity have been defined. Therefore, the food and design industries can use this lack of clarity to their advantage, emphasizing and embellishing some aspects of a product, and perhaps even deliberately omitting others. In doing so, they develop the narrative that will best connect with their audience. In this sense, the ‘authenticity’ of the brand or product is interpreted through this interaction and can be framed as a social construction. These issues are discussed in the context of a short UK-based case study focusing on the supermarket Tesco’s ‘fake farm’ brands that utilize the design and branding of the packaging to evoke specific aspects of ‘authenticity’. The visual material is analysed using a social semiotic approach enabling a discussion of issues relating to the communication of ‘authenticity’ in the practice of graphic design and branding, and the marketing of food with a story.
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‘Nothing added, nothing taken away’ – or laboratory-made naturalness? The semiotics of food product packaging in Germany in the 1990s and today
By Nina JanichAbstractThe hypothesis of the article is that discourses on nutrition always find expression in the way food is marketed and, in particular, in the design of product packaging. A linguistic-semiotic analysis of food packaging in Germany in the 1990s and today explores the relationship between society and nature as it is expressed through packaging designs and texts and is offered to consumers as both orientation and promise. Food advertising in Germany has long focussed on issues of regional origin and natural quality alongside those of taste and enjoyment. Exactly what is meant by ‘natural’ in relation to food produced in an age of industrialization is a matter of debate, however: our understanding of nature can, after all, only be regarded as ‘provisional pragmatic fictions of nature’. The present article takes the results of a 1998 semiotics-based study of the way product packaging, product names and packaging texts make use of scientific language and allusions to biotechnology, comparing this with contemporary marketing strategies. It highlights various pragmatic fictions of nature in food advertising, from ‘probiotic’ promises to a new ‘innocent’ naturalness.
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Nudging food into a healthy direction: The effects of front-of-pack implicit visual cues on food choice
Authors: Stephanie Coulthard, Ignace Hooge, Monique Smeets and Elizabeth ZandstraAbstractThis study investigated the effects of implicit visual cues on food package design on visual attention and subsequent decision-making. Forty-two participants chose between two target or two filler products while their eye movements were measured with eye tracking. Target stimuli were identical soups with labels varying in shape, angularity and orientation inserted at the top right of the packages. Results showed that packages with upward-rounded labels were chosen most often, followed by downward-rounded, upward-angular and downward-angular labels. Participants looked at both packages for 85 per cent of the time, whereas the labels were only fixated on for 14.8 per cent of the time. Hence, people did not necessarily look at the labels in order to make a decision about which product to choose. This research showed that differently shaped labels affected subsequent decision-making when implemented in the peripheral parts of product packs. Interestingly, there was a general preference bias for upward-rounded labels on front of pack. Therefore, presenting upward-rounded labels peripheral on pack may serve as a useful nudge to actively guide people’s behaviour towards a healthier direction.
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