Crown Shapes a Custom Can for a Re-Launch of Low-Fat Foods Line

When Premier Foods' decided to re-launch its brand of low-fat Waistline® products with tastier heat-and-serve recipes, they reinvented the brand—and can—from the ground up. The new hourglass can shape, the new logo, the shrink sleeve label, and on-label bowl pictures were developed together to convey the slimmer shape a consumer might aspire to when enjoying the food.

Premier Foods in Europe hopes the hourglass shape of its new low-fat food line suggests a slimmer future waistline to consumers.

The brand message in a nutshell is that Waistline products help to reduce overall calorie intake without compromising taste. The modern logo and shape were designed in tandem, to complement each other, with cooperation between the innovation team at Crown Food UK & Ireland and Premier Foods. "All of the design elements were intended to accentuate the can shape," says Martin Hall, head of brands and strategy, convenience foods at Premier Foods. "The shape is feminine, and the visual design elements and the new shape come together to generate some great shelf impact."

The curves of the logo and curves of the bowl bend nicely around the inward curves of the can, further accentuating the visual impact of the can shape. Allowing for distortion was still an important step, of course, as the logo would have a life off the can as well. The final designs transferred reasonably easily onto the cans, according to Hall, because all parties involved had significant experience with shrink sleeve technology. There were some minimal equipment considerations on the sleeving line to ensure proper sleeve alignment, but once the sleeve is shrunk to fit the shape of the can, the sleeve is firmly held in place and does not slip.

Crown designs all of its cans with the goal of incurring no added production costs for the end-user beyond the cost of the shaping. "The strategy that we adopted is to look at creating shapes that run through existing production lines," says Ana Ces-Agraso, marketing director, Crown Foods Northwest. The Waistline can required no change to current filling or retort processes at Premier Foods.

The cans hold 13.4 oz. (380 g) of product when full and are a three-piece construction made at a Seesen, Germany, plant. Shaped cans use a softer metal engineered to have the same characteristics regarding the protection of the food compared to traditional cans. Ces-Agraso says this particular shape did not push the limits as far as the difference in diameter from the ends to the middle. Through extensive testing of every aspect of can performance in the entire supply chain, Crown makes sure to not jeopardize what a company is currently doing.

The Waistline cans also feature Crown's latest easy-open ends, called Eole III^{TM. According to Ces-Agraso, Crown believes that Eole III improves the opening experience on all four of the opening "stages": 1) Lifting the Tab; 2) Pop Force to break the seal; 3) Initial Tear Force to start the peel; and 4) Peel-Back Force to remove the lid. The challenge is to create a balance of ease in all four categories while maintaining the strength of the can top. "We have a very controlled opening and a consistent tear force," says Ces-Agraso. Eole III succeeds particularly well in creating a consistent feel from the Initial Tear force to the Peel-Back Force to the complete removal of the lid.}