Design: Cut Fingers in the Kitchen

Package design is the latter-day god of merchandising; executives often spend more of their expensive time worrying about the package than about its contents. Last week, in the trade fortnightly Food Field Reporter, Norman Scott Gardner, a designer himself (Renwal kits, American Can, Empire Brush), took his colleagues sharply to task. “I get the feeling that somewhere along the line, the human values in design have been forgotten.”

Safety is “the most obvious requirement” for a package. Yet, says Gardner, “glass bottles can break, scattering dangerous fragments over a room. Even worse are the unnoticed cracks and chips on glass containers that may indicate the presence of broken glass in the contents…Metal containers with sharp raw edges should be corrected, and this includes the razorlike edge on the lids of open cans. The field here is ripe for a revolution in both can and can-opener design. Also, isn’t there a better way to open evaporated milk cans than with an ice pick?”

Despite the hard sell on “convenience,” Gardner claims that much of that claim is myth. “The new reclosable baby-food jars have lids that are practically un-openable by the average woman; but an unnoticed blow on the lid may be enough to break up the vacuum and cause food spoilage. Sardine tins, with their enigmatic and often nonexistent keys, offer a real challenge to the housewife’s strength, dexterity and perseverance. Vacuum-packed coffee cans with their windup keys are in the same class. In the frozen-food area, the containers are either too hard to open or the frozen contents too difficult to break for convenience in cooking.

“The list of minor inconveniences in packaging is endless: scouring-powder lids that rust, cylindrical salt and oatmeal containers that take up unnecessary room; jars too hard to open; vacuum lids impossible to close…toothpaste caps that get lost; bags of flour that invariably spill; bread that goes stale because of skimpywrapping.

“There is also the quality of integrity in packaging that, when absent, can be an extremely negative factor. Nobody likes to feel cheated, and when you buy a cake of soap only to find that two-thirds of the package volume is box, wrapping and air, and one-third is soap, there is a subtle but unmistakable letdown feeling. The same applies to boxed cereals and crackers that supposedly ‘settle’ in shipment. Misleading packaging is bad business, and people just won’t stand for it much longer.”