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By Linda Casey
Featuring an unusual accordion-type compression, the Tri-tainer wins the Project 2020: The Consumer Experience at Pack Expo Las Vegas 2011. “Current dog food bag packaging is difficult to transport. And, once home, equally as difficult to manage,” says Jeff Hillis, art director at Directions Marketing, which developed the Tri-tainer. “This concept addresses two main challenges—portability and recyclability.”
Directions Marketing, an integrated marketing communications agency, was awarded the Grand Prize for the futuristic package design concept. The Project 2020 design competition is in its second year and was created to challenge the design community to envision how packaging will drive consumers’ purchasing decisions a decade from now.
The winning concept is engineered to bring functionality and recyclability to bulk pet food packaging. The container features an interlocking triangular design, with a uniform size and shape, which work together to make packing, shipping and warehouse storage more efficient. Accordion-type compression reduces container height as product is dispensed, and when empty, the container eventually folds flat for easy recyclability. Consumers gain additional convenience from built-in, pop-up handles and simplified dispensing.
Resealable lids and durable substrates protect product freshness and eliminate the need for consumers to transfer food to separate storage containers. Retailers and brand owners will appreciate the elimination of extraneous packaging, such as corrugated shipping containers, and the potential for a retail-ready display.
“Just because something as ordinary as dog food packaging has seemingly always existed in one way, in a multi-layer bag, doesn’t mean that solution is the only one, or the most successful one,” Hillis remarks. “To make storage and dispensing easier, the food is often transferred from the bag to a separate container. The laminated bag is then thrown out, which causes recycling issues because of the multiple substrates used to make the bag. Tri-trainer solves these problems.”
To help promote the Tri-tainer concept, Directions Marketing created its own brand of premium dog food—“alpha.” The effort involved product naming, positioning, brand identity, and overall packaging graphics design.
“We imagined the entire product lifecycle of filling to disposal, with consumer interaction in the middle,” says Todd Ostendorf, creative director. “Effective packaging design requires understanding what happens in store on the shelf and in the home at point of use. Creating a viable solution draws inspiration from all these perspectives. The end result is a solution that’s greater than the sum of its parts.”
Directions Marketing also received finalist honors for its virtual grocer concept. The agency presented a new shopping experience for 2020 where consumers use on-premise kiosks, mobile devices, and online venues to shop and upload their grocery list for fulfillment at a partially or wholly automated warehouse facility. Individual orders would be picked, packed and made ready for consumer pick-up, enhancing convenience and saving time.
In this scenario, product packaging would also change dramatically, as there would be no need for the differentiation we see on store shelves today. Instead, the differentiation would happen online, but products would be packed in homogenized containers that emphasize functionality, recyclability and space/cost savings. All of the containers would take on a uniform size and shape, thereby making shipping, storage and stacking more efficient. In this situation, the accordion-type compression engineering of the Tri-tainer packaging reduces container height as product is dispensed, and when empty, the container eventually folds flat for easy recyclability.
The entire development team for both concepts included Todd Ostendorf, creative director; Jeff Hillis, art director; Nathan Eid, illustrator; Todd Wohlt, prepress specialist; and Vicki Woschnick, copywriter.
For more articles about food packaging, please visit Package Design's Food channel.
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