Toasting The Season With Festive Packaging Designs
By Paul Pethick
General Absolut Allan’s Holiday Collection Find Your Flavour Gingerbread Cookies Holiday Cookies Indigo Noma Peppermint Tea•••
As many of us have suspected for some time, Indigo bookstores are rarely just all about books at this time of the year, which is how I ended up with the Peppermint Tea package from the California-based Too Good Gourmet on a recent trip to the magazine rack. That said, my compliments to the tea company for managing to bring back a little light-hearted nostalgia with the crafty package design. One of their offerings, adorned with a pair of red figure skates, brought me back to a time when I would make my own Christmas decorations using whatever odds and ends we could find in the school’s art class. With buttons fastened to the top of the skate and paper clips used to make the blades, I didn’t even have to know what was in the package before I started feeling the cheer. Not content with merely getting the red-and-green color scheme of Christmas just right, Too Good Gourmet also added a bright red-and-green bow, attached to a golden twist-tie, to allow for access without destroying the festive packaging. This one is just asking to be hung on the tree as an ornament.
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If packaging were Christmas carols, then the cappuccino-flavored candy canes from the Quebec-based Allan Candy Company Ltd. would be a shoe-in for the perennial favorite Silent Night. Just like that most solemn of hymns, Allan’s Holiday Collection candy canes—also available in the crème caramel flavor—manage to distinguish themselves from more colorful brands by their minimalist approach to packaging, which utilizes a dark blue-and-green background for its cappuccino canes, highlighted with a sprinkling of stars and a frothy cappuccino label. Very classy.
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One of the oddest package designs to be stocked on the shelves this year is the generic-looking set of Holiday Cookies from the Mississauga, Ont.-based Katz Group Canada Ltd. When I think of Christmas cookies, I usually think of cookie tins stacked one on top of the other. Not so with this eight-pack of festively shaped biscuits that stands upright on the shelf—providing it with much more valuable face-to-face time with the shoppers than most of the competition. Unfortunately, the biscuits seem to be let down by the pedestrian packaging execution incorporating a plastic clamshell, decorated with a simple blue-and-white snowflakes, that simply pales in comparison to the Rockwell-ian designs boasted by its neighbors on the shelf. Then there’s also the built-in carrying handle: thoughtful, perhaps, but hardly necessary.
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