Packaging design history: 110 years since the box replaced the clerk

On 6 September 1916, a grocer named Clarence Saunders founded a shop in Memphis where customers walked past open shelves, picked up goods themselves and paid at the front. No clerk stood between the shopper and the product. From that moment the package had to do the clerk’s job: catch an eye, name the maker, promise quality and close the sale in the few seconds a hand hovers over a shelf. Every major change in packaging since then, from cellophane windows to barcodes to AI-generated can art, has been a response to a change in who or what reads the pack. Shoppers read it first, then checkout scanners, then search engines and phone cameras, and now software agents that buy on a person’s behalf.

This analysis follows that thread across more than two thousand years, from stamped Roman fish-sauce jars to the European Union packaging regulation that began applying in August 2026. It separates documented facts from the folklore that surrounds famous packs, and it treats the arrival of generative AI as the latest chapter of an old story rather than a break from it.

The package as the first salesperson in the store

A package does several jobs at once, and the balance between them has shifted with each era. It contains and protects the product. It preserves it. It identifies the maker. It carries information the law requires. And since self-service retail, it persuades. Historians of marketing often separate these into the “functional” and “communicative” roles of packaging, but in practice the two have always been tangled. A tin that keeps syrup fresh for decades is also a statement about reliability; a sealed biscuit box that keeps out damp is also an argument against the open barrel.

The clearest way to read packaging history is to ask who was standing between the product and the buyer at each point. For most of history, a merchant or shopkeeper stood there. The container mattered less than the person who measured out flour, poured oil or wrapped tea, because that person vouched for the goods. A mark on a jar or a printed wrapper mattered most where the goods travelled far from their maker and arrived in the hands of strangers.

That is why the earliest packaging marks appear on long-distance trade goods: wine and oil amphorae in the Mediterranean, needles and medicines in Song dynasty China, and later tea, tobacco and patent remedies shipped across oceans. A mark stood in for a maker who could not be present.

Industrialisation changed the arithmetic. Once factories produced identical goods in volume, the maker’s mark became the main thing that distinguished one sack of crackers from another. Trademark registration, which Britain formalised on 1 January 1876, gave those marks legal weight. Self-service, which arrived four decades later, removed the shopkeeper from the decision. From then on, the pack was the last and often the only voice the brand had at the moment of choice.

The second half of the twentieth century added a new reader: the machine. The Universal Product Code made every pack legible to a scanner after June 1974, and the pack began working for logistics and inventory as much as for shoppers. The internet added another reader: the screen thumbnail on a retailer’s website, where a pack has to work at the size of a postage stamp. And the 2020s added the most unusual reader of all, a generative model that has absorbed millions of product images and can reproduce, test or imitate a pack in seconds.

Each new reader brought new rules. Some came from regulators, who forced warnings, nutrition panels, recycling labels and, in the case of tobacco, the removal of branding altogether. Some came from retailers, who demanded scannable codes and shelf-ready trays. Some came from customers, who punished brands that changed familiar packs too abruptly. The chapters that follow trace those rules in the order they appeared, because most of the constraints a packaging designer faces in 2026 are layered deposits from earlier shifts that never went away.

Stamped jars and painted labels in the ancient Mediterranean

The idea that a container should tell a buyer who made its contents and where they came from is far older than printing. Ceramic amphorae, the standard shipping containers of the ancient Mediterranean, often carried stamps pressed into the clay before firing and painted inscriptions added afterwards. Archaeologists call the painted notes tituli picti, and they functioned much like modern labels, recording the contents, sometimes the producer, the quality grade or the shipper.

The best-documented ancient example of packaging used as branding comes from Pompeii. Aulus Umbricius Scaurus was a first-century manufacturer and merchant of garum and liquamen, the fermented fish sauces that Roman cooks used the way later cuisines used soy sauce or ketchup. Scholars regard him as the town’s leading fish-sauce producer, and painted labels on jars found around the city suggest that he and his household’s businesses controlled a large share of the local supply. Mary Beard has written that his network may have accounted for almost a third of it.

What makes Scaurus unusual is that he advertised his containers inside his own home. The atrium of his house was decorated with a floor mosaic showing a jar of fish sauce at each corner of the impluvium, each one bearing a label. One reads, in abbreviated Latin, as “flower of garum, made of mackerel, a product of Scaurus, from the shop of Scaurus.” Others name liquamen of the first grade. The archaeologist Robert Curtis described the mosaic as an advertisement and as a rare case of a motif chosen by a patron rather than an artist. In effect, Scaurus turned his packaging into the decorative signature of his household, much as a modern company might hang its best-known product in the lobby.

The labels on the jars did the same work modern labels do. They named a grade (“flos,” the flower, meant the finest quality), the base ingredient and the producer. Jars bearing Scaurus’s mark have turned up outside Pompeii, and some came from southern Spain, which suggests he also imported and relabelled product for local sale. That practice, putting a trusted name on goods sourced elsewhere, would become one of the oldest tensions in branding: the label as a promise about origin versus the label as a promise about selection and quality control.

Historians caution against reading too much modern marketing into these finds. Ancient economies did not have mass media, and literacy was limited. But the core mechanism is visible. A mark on a container let a buyer who had never met the maker choose between producers, and a producer with a good reputation had a reason to make that mark visible and consistent. The Mediterranean trade in wine, oil and fish sauce depended on containers that travelled long distances, changed hands several times and arrived at tables far from where they were filled.

The archaeologist David Wengrow has argued that branding of this kind became necessary much earlier, once the cities of ancient Mesopotamia began producing goods such as textiles, cosmetics and drinks in bulk for distant buyers. Seals and stamped marks on containers there served as guarantees of origin and quality. The pattern repeats across cultures: wherever goods travel further than a reputation can walk, containers start carrying identity.

What is absent from this early history is equally instructive. There were no legal registries for these marks, no statutory protection against copying and no standard information that a container had to carry. Each producer decided what to say. Two thousand years later, almost every word and symbol on a supermarket pack is shaped by law, standards bodies or retailer specifications. The freedom Scaurus enjoyed in his mosaic, to praise his own product without constraint, is the part of packaging history that has shrunk the most.

A white rabbit on a Song dynasty needle wrapper

If Pompeii offers the oldest well-documented brand on a container, China offers the oldest surviving printed brand message. In the collection of the National Museum of China sits a bronze printing plate from the Northern Song dynasty (960 to 1127) made for the Liu family’s fine needle shop in Jinan, in what is now Shandong province. The plate printed square sheets of paper carrying the shop’s name, a short sales message and a picture of a white rabbit pounding medicine with a pestle.

The text, as commonly translated, tells customers that the shop buys good steel rods and makes fine needles ready for use at home, and it asks them to look for the white rabbit in front of the shop. The World Intellectual Property Organization has reproduced the plate in its magazine as an early example of a trademark, and Chinese packaging scholars describe the printed sheet as the earliest known packaging paper that combines a trademark with an advertising slogan. The rabbit did three jobs that every brand mark still does: it was memorable, it pointed to a specific maker and it worked for buyers who could not read.

That last point matters more than it first appears. Needle buyers in the Song period were mostly women managing households, and literacy was far from universal. A picture of a rabbit from the folk tale of the moon’s medicine-pounding hare could be recognised at a glance and recalled when shopping. The same logic would drive later trade marks built around animals and figures, from the lion on Lyle’s syrup tins to the countless mascots of the twentieth century.

Whether the printed sheets were used mainly as posters, handbills or wrappers is debated, and some sources describe them as advertisements rather than packaging. The distinction is less sharp than it sounds. Chinese commercial culture of the period used printed paper both for promotion and for wrapping goods, and later dynasties left clearer evidence of printed wrappers. Archaeologists working on a Yuan dynasty grave in 1985 reportedly found a wrapper advertising a paint business, which suggests that printing advertising directly onto the paper used to wrap and carry goods was established practice by then.

The Song economy explains why this appeared when it did. The period saw rapid commercial growth, dense urban markets, paper money and widespread printing. Competing workshops sold similar goods to crowds of strangers, and imitators were a real problem. A distinctive mark helped both buyers and honest sellers. Branding emerges wherever markets become large and anonymous enough that personal reputation no longer travels with the goods, and Song dynasty cities met that condition centuries before Europe did.

The needle shop’s plate also shows a feature of packaging that modern designers sometimes forget: the message was short, concrete and checkable. It named the raw material, made a claim about workmanship and gave a way to find the shop. There were no abstractions about lifestyle or purpose. Much of the best packaging copy of the following thousand years kept to that discipline, and many of the most expensive packaging failures of the twentieth century broke it.

Guild marks, apothecary jars and the pre-industrial label

Between the ancient world and the industrial revolution, most goods in Europe were sold loose. Bread came from the baker’s counter, flour and salt were weighed out of sacks, wine and beer were drawn from barrels into the buyer’s own vessel. Containers belonged to the shop or the customer, not to the product. That arrangement kept the merchant’s reputation at the centre of the transaction and left little room for packaging as a brand signal.

Marks still mattered where trust was hard to verify. The most durable pre-industrial marking system in Europe was hallmarking of precious metals, which in England dates to a statute of 1300 that required silver to meet the sterling standard and to carry an official mark. The word “hallmark” itself comes from Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, where items were assayed and stamped. Hallmarks were not brands in the marketing sense; they were guarantees backed by an institution. But they set a template that later product labelling would follow: a standard symbol, applied under rules, that lets a buyer trust something they cannot test themselves.

Craft guilds used makers’ marks on goods such as pewter, cutlery, paper and textiles, partly to enforce quality rules and partly to trace faulty work back to its maker. Watermarks in paper, first used in Italy in the thirteenth century, identified mills. Printers’ devices on title pages identified publishers. All of these were early forms of product identity, although they appeared on the goods rather than on separate packages.

The containers that came closest to modern packaging were in the drug and luxury trades. Apothecaries kept remedies in glazed jars labelled with the contents, and by the eighteenth century the trade in proprietary medicines in Britain and its colonies had produced bottles, boxes and printed paper wrappers bearing the maker’s name, instructions and extravagant claims. Tea, tobacco and snuff were sold in printed papers and tins carrying merchant names and emblems. These sectors had something in common: high value per gram, long supply chains and buyers who could not judge quality by sight. That combination makes a branded container worth its cost.

Glass bottles show the same pattern. Wine merchants and makers of mineral water, spirits and sauces began moulding names or seals into bottles, and paper labels became common as printing grew cheaper. Yet until the nineteenth century, the cost of making containers by hand and printing labels in small runs kept packaged goods expensive. Most households bought most of their food without any brand at all.

The pre-industrial label also carried a lesson about fraud that would shape the next two centuries. Counterfeit medicines, watered wine and adulterated tea were constant complaints. Every time a mark became worth something, someone copied it, and the legal tools to stop them were weak and slow. The pressure to create formal trade mark registries in the nineteenth century came less from marketing ambition than from the cost of being imitated.

Appert’s bottles, Durand’s patent and a can without an opener

The modern packaged-food industry began with a military problem. In the 1790s the French government offered a prize of 12,000 francs for a reliable way to preserve food for armies and navies on long campaigns. Nicolas Appert, a Paris confectioner, spent years sealing food in glass bottles and heating them, and he won the prize around 1810, publishing a book on his method the same year. Appert did not know why the method worked; that explanation would wait for Louis Pasteur. He only knew that heat and an airtight seal kept food edible for months.

Glass had obvious drawbacks for soldiers and sailors: it was heavy and it broke. On 25 August 1810, a London merchant named Peter Durand received British patent number 3372 for preserving food in vessels of glass, pottery, tin or other metals. Durand’s patent is usually treated as the birth certificate of the tin can, although historians of canmaking have argued that the method came from another Frenchman, Philippe de Girard, who used Durand as his British agent. Durand did not manufacture anything himself. He sold the patent for £1,000 to the engineer Bryan Donkin and his partner John Hall, who set up a canning works in London and were supplying canned food to the British army and navy by 1813.

Early cans were made by hand from tinplate, iron sheet coated with tin to resist rust, with lids soldered on. A skilled worker might produce only a few cans an hour. Contents were mostly meat, soup and vegetables for military and expedition use. Polar explorers and naval ships carried them, and canned rations became a symbol of reach: food that could travel anywhere and wait indefinitely.

For almost fifty years after the can was invented, there was no dedicated tool to open it. Instructions on some early cans told the user to cut around the top with a chisel and hammer. The first patented can opener in the United States was granted to Ezra Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1858, and the familiar rotating-wheel design came later, around 1870. Cans had to become lighter and thinner, and they had to reach ordinary kitchens rather than ships’ stores, before opening them became a consumer problem worth solving.

The can matters to brand history for two reasons. First, it created the idea of a sealed, standardised unit of food that the buyer could not inspect before opening. That put the burden of trust on the label and the maker’s name. Second, it made the container part of the product’s value proposition. A can promised safety, durability and convenience, and the label could say so.

The paper label wrapped around a can became one of the most familiar surfaces in commercial design. Campbell’s adopted its red-and-white label around 1898, a colour scheme the company has said was inspired by Cornell University’s football uniforms, and that label became so embedded in American life that Andy Warhol painted thirty-two versions of it in 1962. A design created to tell grocery shoppers which soup they were holding became a subject of fine art within two generations, which says something about how deeply packaging had entered everyday vision.

Mechanisation followed. Double-seamed cans that needed no solder appeared around the start of the twentieth century, and automatic can-making lines pushed output from dozens per hour to thousands. Lower costs moved canned food from the military and the wealthy to every household. With mass production came the need to distinguish one canner’s peas from another’s, and that need flowed straight into the trade mark registries that were opening across the industrial world.

Trademark law turns a label into property

Before the 1870s, a business that found its label copied had to go to court and prove, case by case, that it had used the mark first and that buyers associated it with its goods. That was slow, expensive and uncertain. The Trade Marks Registration Act 1875 changed this in the United Kingdom by creating a public register. A registered mark served as evidence of ownership, and the burden shifted towards the copier.

The register opened on 1 January 1876, and UK trade mark number one went to Bass & Co for the red triangle label on its pale ale. Bass also secured the second registration, a red diamond for its strong ale. A popular story says a Bass employee queued overnight outside the registry on New Year’s Eve to be first; beer historians point out that there is no evidence for the queue, and the application may have arrived by post. What is documented is that Bass had good reason to hurry. Its pale ale was exported across the British Empire, and inferior beers were being sold under imitation triangles.

The red triangle itself predated the act. Bass had used triangles on casks since before 1855, and a clerk at its London agency designed a bottle label with the red triangle in 1855. Registration did not create the brand; it made the brand defensible. That distinction still defines the economics of packaging. A distinctive pack builds recognition over decades, but only legal protection lets a company stop others from borrowing that recognition.

The UK Intellectual Property Office marked the register’s 150th anniversary in 2026 with a public vote on the country’s most iconic trade marks. It reported that the register now protects more than 2.5 million marks, and it noted that the Bass label remains on the register. Among the Victorian registrations the IPO highlighted was “Out of the strong came forth sweetness,” first registered in 1884, which still protects Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Cadbury registered in 1886 and Kodak in 1888.

Other countries built their own systems in the same period. The United States passed a federal trademark law in 1870, which the Supreme Court struck down in 1879, and Congress replaced it with narrower legislation in 1881. Germany introduced a national trade mark law in 1874. Within a single generation, the industrial economies turned the marks on packages from informal signals into tradable assets that could be licensed, sold and valued on balance sheets.

The legal concept that matters most for packaging is distinctiveness. A trade mark registry protects signs that identify the origin of goods, not signs that merely describe them. A plain picture of an orange on orange juice is descriptive; a specific, consistent arrangement of an orange with a straw, used for years, can become distinctive. Over the twentieth century, courts and registries extended protection beyond words and logos to colours, shapes and the whole “get-up” of a pack, sometimes called trade dress. Coca-Cola’s contour bottle, Toblerone’s triangular bar and Tiffany’s blue box all rely on that expansion.

Distinctiveness also explains why packaging redesigns carry legal as well as commercial risk. A brand that abandons a long-used visual cue can weaken its own legal protection, because the mark’s strength depends on continuous use and public recognition. Tropicana’s 2009 redesign, discussed later in this analysis, threw away commercial recognition; it also, briefly, set aside a cue that years of use had made defensible.

Lyle’s Golden Syrup and the economics of never changing

Abram Lyle’s sugar refinery in east London began selling golden syrup, a by-product of refining, in the early 1880s. The product was first sold from barrels; the green and gold tin took shape in 1883, and the design familiar to British shoppers was in place by 1885. It showed a lion lying dead with bees swarming around it and the line from the Book of Judges, “out of the strong came forth sweetness,” referring to Samson’s riddle about honey found in a lion’s carcass.

It is an odd image for breakfast syrup. It is also one of the most commercially important pieces of packaging in Britain. In 2006 Guinness World Records recognised the Lyle’s tin as the world’s oldest branding and packaging, noting that it had changed only slightly, mainly because of wartime material shortages. During the First World War, metal went to the front and the syrup was briefly sold in cardboard containers. The company’s own history notes that tins left by Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition, rediscovered in 1956, were still in good condition. Research quoted at the time of the Guinness award found that more than 85 percent of British shoppers recognised the tin instantly.

The commercial lesson is that recognition compounds. Every year a pack stays the same, it adds to a stock of memory in the minds of shoppers. That stock lowers the cost of every future sale: a shopper scanning a crowded shelf finds the product faster, trusts it more and needs less advertising to be reminded of it. Marketing researchers call such elements “distinctive brand assets,” and the Lyle’s tin is close to a pure case. The tin works because it has not moved, not because it is beautiful.

The brand has not been frozen entirely. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2008, the owners issued special gold-coloured tins while keeping the logo. In February 2024 the brand introduced a simplified identity, with a stylised lion’s head and a bee, for its squeezy bottles and other formats, describing it as the first major change in roughly 140 years. Coverage of the change made clear that the classic tin would keep the original lion and bees. The owners split the difference: modernise where the brand is growing, protect the asset that carries the heritage.

That compromise is now standard practice among heritage brands. A company can run a contemporary identity across new products and digital channels while keeping its oldest pack untouched as an anchor. The risk is fragmentation, a brand that looks like two different companies. The benefit is that the anchor keeps doing its work. Lyle’s also illustrates a point about legal protection. The slogan “out of the strong came forth sweetness” was registered in 1884, and the lion-and-bees image was registered as a trade mark in 1904. More than a century of continuous use makes these marks extremely strong, and abandoning them would throw away legal strength along with consumer memory.

For designers working with AI tools in 2026, the Lyle’s case is a useful counterweight. Generative systems make it cheap to produce endless variations, and the temptation is to refresh constantly. The history of the most lucrative packs suggests the opposite instinct: find the one or two cues that shoppers rely on, protect them fiercely and experiment around them rather than on them.

Lithographed tins and the Victorian shelf as theatre

The decades between 1850 and 1914 turned packaging from a utility into a medium. Three technologies made that possible: cheaper paper and board, colour printing through chromolithography and, from the 1870s, offset lithography that could print several colours directly onto tinplate. Together they let manufacturers put pictures, colour and elaborate lettering on containers that ordinary households bought.

The decorative biscuit tin is the emblem of that era. British biscuit makers such as Huntley & Palmers of Reading sold biscuits in printed tins that kept the product crisp in transit and became collectable objects in their own right. Tins were made to look like books, carriages, baskets and buildings. They were exported across the empire and reused for decades as boxes for buttons, sewing kits and documents. The container outlived the contents, and the brand outlived the container in the household’s memory.

Chromolithographed labels appeared on fruit crates, cigar boxes, patent medicines, soap and canned goods. Cigar box art in particular became an elaborate visual language of medals, portraits and gold embossing, designed to signal quality in a trade where buyers could not taste before purchase. American fruit-crate labels from California and Florida developed bold pictorial styles that were meant to be read at a distance in a wholesale market.

This was packaging designed for display, but not yet for self-service. Goods sat behind counters or on high shelves, and the shopkeeper still handed them over. Decoration served the shopkeeper’s display and the customer’s home rather than the moment of choice in an aisle. The persuasive power of the Victorian pack worked through prestige and reuse more than through shelf competition.

The era also produced the first recognisable brand portfolios in packaged goods. Soap makers such as Lever Brothers in Britain and Procter & Gamble in the United States sold individually wrapped bars under trade-marked names, and their wrappers carried consistent typography and colour. Branded soap is a telling case: it replaced bars cut from long blocks by the grocer, and the wrapper did the work of separating the maker’s product from anonymous stock. Lever’s Sunlight soap, launched in the 1880s, was sold in printed paper wrappers rather than cut to order.

A modern reader will notice how much visual noise these packs contained. Medals from exhibitions, testimonials, royal warrants, line drawings of factories and long paragraphs of claims crowded together. Legibility was not yet a design value, partly because shoppers had time and partly because there was no competing pack beside it. When self-service arrived and dozens of brands sat side by side, the crowded Victorian label gave way to the simplified, high-contrast pack that could be recognised from several metres away.

Robert Gair’s slipped rule and the folding carton

Robert Gair was a Scottish-born printer who emigrated to New York as a teenager in 1853 and built a paper bag business in Manhattan. In 1879, a pressman at his factory was printing small paper seed bags when a metal rule meant to crease the paper shifted and cut through thousands of sheets instead. The usual account is that Gair looked at the ruined bags and saw that a press could crease and cut paperboard in a single pass.

Until then, boxes were made by hand. Cartons in the mid-nineteenth century were assembled with tacks, string and glue and were used mainly for expensive items such as jewellery. Gair developed a process in which printing, creasing and cutting happened together on the press, producing flat blanks that could be shipped cheaply and folded into boxes at the packer’s plant. The folding carton made the printed box cheap enough for ordinary groceries, and it is widely credited with creating the packaging industry in its modern form.

The economics deserve attention. A flat blank takes a fraction of the space of a finished box, so it costs far less to store and ship. The packer folds and glues it on its own line just before filling. Printing happens on the same sheet that becomes the structure, so the decoration costs almost nothing extra. That combination turned every box into a billboard. Encyclopedia accounts of the folding carton note that inexpensive cartons allowed even common items to be placed in showy packs, with each carton serving as its own advertisement.

Gair’s company grew quickly. In 1888 he moved production to Brooklyn, in the area now called Dumbo, where he bought so many buildings that locals nicknamed the neighbourhood “Gairville.” His customers included tobacco firms, toiletries makers and department stores, and later cereal makers such as Kellogg. The breakthrough customer, though, was a newly merged biscuit company that wanted a nationally recognised product.

The folding carton is still the backbone of shelf packaging. Cereal, tea, toothpaste, pharmaceuticals and frozen food all depend on it. Its persistence shows how a low-cost structural invention can outlast generations of graphic styles. Designers change what is printed on the carton every few years; the carton itself has barely changed in 140 years. Paperboard’s renewed popularity in the 2020s, as brands move away from plastics under regulatory pressure, has given Gair’s invention another long run.

There is a design tension built into the folding carton that remains unresolved. Package engineers point out that a cereal box could use far less board for the same volume if it were deeper and narrower, but that would shrink the large front panel that marketing teams want for graphics. The “billboard” format won the argument for most of the twentieth century. Regulation that targets empty space and material weight, including the European rules discussed later, is reopening it.

Uneeda Biscuit and the end of the cracker barrel

In 1898 a group of bakery combines merged to form the National Biscuit Company, later known as Nabisco. Its chairman, the Chicago lawyer Adolphus Green, wanted a single national product that would carry the company’s name into every grocery in the country. He chose the most ordinary item possible, the soda cracker, which grocers sold loose from barrels by weight.

Green’s insight was that the product’s weakness was its container. Crackers in an open barrel went stale and soft, gathered dust and were handled by everyone. Green gave the company’s cracker a distinctive octagonal shape and packed it in a small carton lined with waxed paper, a system the company called the “In-er-Seal.” Mondelez, Nabisco’s current owner, describes the package as inter-folded layers of wax paper and cardboard and calls it the first of many innovations in biscuit packaging. The package turned freshness, which had been the grocer’s responsibility, into the manufacturer’s promise.

The name came from the Philadelphia advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son, which suggested “Uneeda Biscuit.” The company registered the name in December 1898, and in early 1899 Ayer launched a teaser campaign asking readers whether they knew Uneeda Biscuit. The company spent heavily on advertising in its first decade; one widely cited figure puts the total at about $7 million, an extraordinary sum for the time. Ayer created the image of a boy in a yellow raincoat and hat clutching a box of crackers, a visual argument that the package kept out the damp.

The pricing was also new. Each box sold for five cents, a fixed price for a fixed quantity under a fixed name. That simple arrangement is easy to overlook, but it was a departure from loose goods sold by weight at whatever price the grocer set. A branded package created a standard unit of value that a shopper could compare across stores and over time.

Uneeda’s success set a template that most packaged-goods companies followed for the next century: a distinctive product, a protective and recognisable pack, a memorable name and heavy national advertising pointing shoppers towards the pack. The company’s red octagonal In-er-Seal emblem evolved into the Nabisco logo. Oreo followed in 1912.

There is an irony in Uneeda’s later history. The brand that took crackers out of the barrel declined over the twentieth century and was discontinued in 2008, while the packaging logic it pioneered became universal. A company can lose a product and keep the method. The cracker barrel itself became a symbol of nostalgia, the very thing packaged goods had made obsolete.

For the modern reader, Uneeda shows how packaging and advertising fused. The pack was not just the object being advertised; the pack was the argument of the advertising. Sanitary, sealed, fresh, uniform: every claim in the campaign was a claim about the container. That fusion would intensify once self-service put the pack in front of the shopper without anyone to explain it.

Piggly Wiggly hands the sale to the shelf

Before 1916, an American grocery customer typically handed a list to a clerk, who walked the shelves behind the counter, gathered the goods, weighed loose items, wrapped them and often recorded the purchase on credit. The clerk was salesman, packer and adviser at once. A customer who asked for crackers might be steered towards whatever the grocer preferred to sell.

Clarence Saunders, a Memphis wholesaler, thought this system wasted labour and kept prices high. His first Piggly Wiggly store, founded on 6 September 1916 at 79 Jefferson Street in Memphis, let customers enter through a turnstile, take a basket, walk aisles of open shelves and pick goods themselves before paying at a checkout. Saunders filed a patent for the “self-serving store” in October 1916, and it was granted in October 1917. Later patents covered the store layout and his method of placing price tags next to each item. By 1923 the chain had grown to more than 1,200 stores, including franchises.

Self-service removed the human intermediary from the moment of choice, and the package took over his job. In a Piggly Wiggly aisle, a shopper standing in front of competing brands of soap or coffee had nobody to ask. The pack had to identify itself, explain what it was, signal quality and price, and win against its neighbour in a few seconds. The Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that Piggly Wiggly carried nationally produced brands and drew customers by capitalising on national advertising. The store layout itself, which guided customers past every shelf, was built on Saunders’s observation that people who see more buy more.

That changed what manufacturers needed from packaging. Visibility at a distance became more important than detail up close. Consistency across sizes and flavours helped shoppers find a brand family. Colour blocking on a shelf, where many packs of one brand line up side by side, created a wall of recognition. Price marking, at first on shelf tags, became part of the shopping experience. Every principle of shelf design that brand managers learn today, from facing counts to colour contrast, traces back to the moment when the clerk disappeared.

The idea spread fast. Competing chains adopted self-service through the 1920s and 1930s, and the supermarket format that emerged in the 1930s combined self-service with larger stores, car parking and lower margins. After the Second World War, self-service spread to Europe, where it arrived in most countries in the 1950s and 1960s, and later to the rest of the world.

The deep consequence was that branding became a manufacturer’s discipline rather than a retailer’s. When the grocer selected and recommended goods, the store’s reputation carried much of the trust. Once shoppers chose for themselves, manufacturers invested in national brands, advertising and packaging to reach them directly. The supermarket aisle became the most contested advertising space in the economy, and packaging was its medium.

The same logic is replaying in 2026, with a twist. Online retail first moved the decision from a shelf to a screen, where a pack appears as a small image beside reviews and prices. Now AI shopping assistants and agents are beginning to make some decisions on a person’s behalf, reading product data rather than looking at the front of a box. Saunders took the clerk out of the store. Software agents threaten to take the shopper out of the aisle, and with them the glance that packaging has been designed to win for 110 years.

The contour bottle as a legal weapon

By 1912 Coca-Cola had a problem that its logo could not solve. The drink was sold by hundreds of independent bottlers in plain straight-sided bottles, often brown or clear, with the Coca-Cola name embossed or on a paper label. Imitators with names such as Koke, Koca-Nola and Toka-Cola copied the script and the look, and the company’s lawsuits took years. The company first tried a diamond-shaped paper label in 1906 to stand out. It was not enough.

The bottlers pushed for a “distinctive package,” and on 26 April 1915 the trustees of the Coca-Cola Bottling Association voted to spend up to $500 on a new bottle. Eight to ten glass companies received a brief that became one of the most famous in design history: create a bottle so distinct that a person could recognise it by feel in the dark or from fragments lying broken on the ground. The brief defined the bottle as a legal and tactile identifier first and a container second.

The winning design came from the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana. A team that included Earl R. Dean and Clyde Edwards researched shapes in the local library and found an illustration of a cocoa pod, with an elongated body and ribs. The company filed the design under the name of its plant superintendent, Alexander Samuelson, and the patent was granted on 16 November 1915. Coca-Cola notes that the patent drawing deliberately omitted the Coca-Cola script to keep the client secret. The patented version was too wide to fit bottlers’ crates, so it was slimmed for production in 1916.

The specification was demanding. The glass was to be tinted “German Green,” later renamed “Georgia Green,” and each bottle had to weigh at least 14.5 ounces of glass, so that a filled bottle weighed more than a pound. Bottlers resisted at first because glass was their biggest cost, and Coca-Cola ran national advertising featuring the new bottle to win them over. By 1920 most had switched.

The bottle’s design patents were renewed in 1923, with a date that fell on Christmas Day and gave the “Christmas bottle” its nickname, and again in 1937. When patent protection finally ran out around 1951, the company asked for the shape itself to be recognised as a trade mark on the grounds that the public associated it with Coca-Cola. The US Patent and Trademark Office registered the contour bottle as a trade mark in 1960. A shape that began as a patent became a perpetual trade mark because decades of use had made it inseparable from the brand.

The contour bottle is the founding case for treating packaging shape as brand property. It inspired later shape marks for perfume bottles, chocolate bars and spirits bottles. It also showed something designers now rely on: a strong shape survives changes of material. Coca-Cola has carried the contour into plastic bottles, aluminium bottles and graphic outlines on cans. Its 1996 annual report printed only the silhouette, with the caption “Quick, name a soft drink.”

Andy Warhol’s paintings of Coke bottles in the early 1960s, like his Campbell’s soup cans, turned mass-produced packaging into high art. That cultural status has a measurable commercial value: a pack that appears in art, film and memory becomes harder for any competitor to dislodge. In the 2020s that cultural saturation has a new audience: image-generation models trained on billions of pictures absorb the most repeated shapes in visual culture, a point the Heinz experiment discussed later makes vivid for ketchup.

Cellophane and the right to see inside

Self-service created a new demand that paper and tin could not meet: shoppers wanted to see the product before buying it. A sealed box protected crackers but hid them. Meat, bakery goods, sweets and produce needed a wrapper that kept them clean and fresh while letting the buyer judge them by eye.

Cellophane, a transparent film made from regenerated cellulose, had been invented in 1908 by the Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger, who was trying to make a spill-proof tablecloth coating. Commercial production started in France in 1912, and the American confectioner Whitman’s began wrapping its Sampler boxes in imported cellophane that year. DuPont bought the US rights in 1923 and began making the film in Buffalo, New York, in 1924. The early film had a flaw: it held liquid water but let water vapour through, so wrapped food still dried out or went soggy.

DuPont hired a young chemist, William Hale Charch, to fix it. After some 2,000 failed attempts, he developed a coating of nitrocellulose, wax, a plasticiser and a blending agent that made the film moisture-proof while adding only about 10 percent to its weight. DuPont launched moisture-proof cellophane in 1927, and its cellophane sales tripled between 1928 and 1930. By 1938, cellophane accounted for roughly 10 percent of DuPont’s sales and a quarter of its profits.

The Science History Institute notes that cellophane’s rise coincided with, and encouraged, the growth of self-service food retail. The Harvard Business School historian Ai Hisano has written about cellophane’s role in creating a “new visuality” in food shopping. The film played a central part in bringing fresh meat into self-service, because a shopper could inspect a cut through the wrap rather than asking a butcher. Transparency became a selling point in its own right, and packaging began to show the product rather than describe it.

Cellophane also carried symbolic weight. DuPont marketed it as a sign of cleanliness and modernity, and it became so familiar that Cole Porter listed it among the marvels in the 1934 song “You’re the Top.” Its brand name became a generic word in many languages, a loss of distinctiveness that every brand owner fears and that cellophane experienced in full.

The material’s dominance did not last. Cheaper petroleum-based films took its markets: polyethylene for baked goods, polyvinyl chloride for meat and oriented polypropylene for cigarette wrapping. Those films needed roughly half as much energy to produce. By the 1980s, cellophane production had nearly stopped, although cellulose film has had a modest revival as brands look for alternatives to fossil plastics.

The shift from cellophane to plastics is a reminder that packaging materials are chosen on cost and performance first, symbolism second. Yet the expectation cellophane created, that a shopper should be able to see the food inside, has never gone away. Window cartons, clear tubs and see-through pouches all trace their logic to the late 1920s, and transparent packaging now faces scrutiny of a different kind, as regulators push against hard-to-recycle multilayer films.

A timeline of the inventions that set the rules

By the late 1920s, most of the building blocks of modern packaging were in place: sealed containers, printed board, legal protection for marks, self-service shelves and transparent film. The table below collects the documented milestones covered so far, together with the problem each one solved. It is selective, and it leaves out many regional and technical developments, but it shows how each step answered a specific commercial pressure rather than an abstract design ambition.

Table 1. Documented packaging milestones from antiquity to the self-service era

Read top to bottom, the table shows the centre of gravity moving from the producer’s identity to the shopper’s experience. Early milestones answer the question “who made this?” while later ones answer “will I notice it, trust it and be able to see it?” The post-war milestones that follow add a third question, which became dominant after 1974: can a machine read it?

Two patterns stand out. First, structural inventions, such as the can, the carton and cellophane, lasted far longer than any graphic style printed on them. Second, legal and retail changes, such as trade mark registration and self-service, did more to change what packaging had to do than any single design. That pattern holds for the twenty-first century too. Generative AI changes how packs are drawn and tested, but regulation, retail formats and the arrival of software shoppers will decide what packs must say.

Industrial designers and the simplified pack

The 1930s produced a new profession in the United States: the industrial designer, hired by manufacturers to redesign products and packages for a mass market hungry for modern-looking goods. Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes worked on locomotives, refrigerators and radios, and they brought the same principles of simplification, clean lines and strong contrast to packaging.

Loewy’s redesign of the Lucky Strike cigarette pack is the best-known packaging story of the period, and it is partly myth. In 1940, American Tobacco’s president George Washington Hill challenged Loewy to improve the brand’s dark green pack, which carried a red target on one side. Loewy’s redesign put the red target on both faces of the pack, so that it showed the logo however it landed on a table or counter, and tightened the typography. The background changed from dark green to white, a shift that market researchers argued would appeal more to women smokers and that also cut printing costs and removed the smell of the green ink.

The famous campaign came in 1942: “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war.” It implied that the green pigment was needed for the war effort. Snopes and later histories have concluded that the change was a business decision dressed in patriotism; one account notes that American Tobacco used chromium for the green ink and copper for the gold trim, both of which were in short supply, but the redesign would have happened regardless. The episode is an early example of a brand reframing a packaging change as a public-spirited sacrifice, a technique that recurs in modern “eco-redesign” announcements.

The industrial designers taught manufacturers that a pack should work as a single bold image, legible at a distance and on every face. Loewy’s double-sided Lucky Strike pack is a lesson in thinking about how a package is actually encountered: dropped on a bar, held in a shirt pocket, stacked on a shelf. The designer’s job was to anticipate every orientation and make sure the brand appeared in each.

The new profession also brought a dose of theatre. Designers presented themselves as experts in consumer psychology, though their methods were often intuitive. Their influence spread through design firms that worked across dozens of clients and categories, standardising a vocabulary of sans-serif type, simple geometric emblems and confident colour fields that dominated post-war supermarket shelves.

The post-war years then brought the branding consultancy, which treated the pack as one part of a coordinated corporate identity. Firms such as Landor Associates, founded by Walter Landor in San Francisco in 1941, built practices around packaging and identity for large consumer brands. The work became more systematic: brand guidelines, colour standards and pack architecture that governed how a brand’s variants, flavours and sizes related to one another.

The era’s lasting contribution is the idea that packaging can be designed deliberately, with research and rules, rather than assembled by printers and salesmen. That idea paved the way for the most influential packaging researcher of the twentieth century, whose work showed that a pack does not merely signal quality but changes how the product itself is experienced.

Louis Cheskin and sensation transference

Louis Cheskin was a Ukrainian-born psychologist and marketer who founded the Color Research Institute of America in Chicago in the 1930s, later renamed Louis Cheskin Associates. His central claim, tested repeatedly in commercial studies, was that people do not separate a product from its packaging when they judge it. The feelings a shopper has about the pack, its colour, shape, material and name, transfer to the product inside. He called this effect sensation transference, and it remains one of the most cited ideas in packaging psychology.

His best-known case involved margarine. In the post-war United States, margarine was a cheap butter substitute with a poor reputation, and it was naturally pale, close to white. Working for the makers of Good Luck margarine, Cheskin recommended colouring it yellow and changing the wrapper. Accounts differ on the starting material, waxed paper or a dull plastic, but they agree he switched it to foil, which at the time signalled premium food. He also tested the product indirectly, serving it at lunches without telling diners what it was, rather than asking focus groups whether they liked margarine. The margarine he later helped position for Unilever was named Imperial and carried a crown logo, sold in blocks the size of butter sticks.

Malcolm Gladwell popularised Cheskin’s work in Blink, describing how a piece of bread spread with foil-wrapped yellow Imperial margarine beat one spread with plain white margarine in taste tests even though the product was the same. Gladwell also recounted a test in which adding 15 percent more yellow to the 7 Up can led tasters to report a stronger lemon or lime flavour. The packaging did not just persuade people to buy; it changed what they said they tasted.

Cheskin’s 1951 book Color for Profit argued for a scientific approach to colour in design. His firm worked on cars as well as consumer goods, including research for Ford, and its later work extended to brand identities across categories. Among his reported findings was that American consumers preferred circles to triangles on packaging, a claim that is hard to verify but reflects the kind of question his firm tested systematically.

The idea that shoppers judge products partly through their packaging has since been studied in academic settings under names such as “cross-modal correspondence” and “sensory marketing.” Researchers have found that the colour of a container can influence perceived sweetness, that the weight of a package can influence perceived quality and that the sound of opening a pack can affect perceived freshness. Not every result replicates cleanly, and many studies use small samples, but the broad pattern is well supported: packaging is part of the product experience, not just a wrapper around it.

Cheskin’s methods also anticipated a core problem in AI-era testing. He distrusted what people said in focus groups and preferred to observe what they did when they did not know they were being tested. Modern packaging research faces the same problem in a new form. Surveys, eye-tracking studies, online preference tests and AI models trained to predict attention all measure something, but the closer a test gets to a real purchase in a real shop, the more reliable it tends to be. The gap between stated preference and actual behaviour is the reason so many redesigns that tested well have failed in the aisle.

The ethical side of sensation transference also deserves a mention. If packaging changes perceived taste, it can mislead as easily as it can delight. A premium-looking pack around an ordinary product is a commercial strategy; a pack that implies health, origin or quantity that the product does not deliver is a consumer protection problem. Much of the regulation that took over the back and sides of packs in the second half of the twentieth century exists because sensation transference works.

Tetra Pak and packaging as logistics

While American designers were refining the look of packaging, a Swedish company was rethinking its structure for an entirely different purpose: moving liquid food through supply chains without refrigeration or glass. Ruben Rausing, co-founder of the packaging firm Åkerlund & Rausing, had been working since the 1940s on a paper-based carton for milk. The engineer Erik Wallenberg proposed a tetrahedron shape, which could be formed from a continuous tube of plastic-coated paperboard, filled with liquid and sealed in one process. The tetrahedron design was patented in 1944.

AB Tetra Pak was established in Lund in 1951, and the system was presented to the press in May of that year. In September 1952, the first Tetra Pak machine was delivered to a local dairy in Lund, which began selling cream in 100 millilitre tetrahedrons that November. Machines for half-litre milk packs followed in 1954, and the first export machine went to Hamburg the same year.

The tetrahedron was clever but awkward to stack and transport. The company’s commercial breakthrough came with the rectangular Tetra Brik in 1963 and, above all, with aseptic technology, which sterilised both the carton material and the product so that milk and juice could be stored for months at room temperature. The Tetra Brik Aseptic followed in 1969. The company’s growth through the late 1960s and 1970s rested largely on that format.

Tetra Pak matters to brand history because it made packaging a logistics system first and a canvas second. The rectangular carton fits pallets and shelves with little wasted space, cutting transport costs. Aseptic packaging removed the need for a cold chain in many markets, opening up distribution in countries where refrigeration was scarce. The carton’s shape was decided by trucks and pallets, not by marketers, yet its large flat faces turned out to be excellent printing surfaces.

The company also illustrates the business model of the packaging-system supplier. Tetra Pak sells or leases filling machines and supplies the packaging material that runs on them, binding dairies and juice makers into long relationships. That model gave packaging suppliers great influence over what brands could do with their packs, because the machine determined the shapes, sizes and opening features available.

Environmental scrutiny has followed the carton’s success. A Tetra Brik combines paperboard, polyethylene and, for aseptic versions, a thin aluminium layer, which makes recycling more complex than for a single material. The company has invested in recycling partnerships and in alternatives to the aluminium layer, and the European regulatory push for recyclable packaging by 2030 puts multi-material cartons under particular pressure. The tension between logistical performance and end-of-life recovery, invisible in 1952, is now one of the central questions in packaging design.

Ring pulls, PET and the convenience decades

The decades after the Second World War made convenience the dominant packaging value in rich economies. Households had cars, refrigerators and less time; supermarkets had more products than ever; and manufacturers competed on how easily a product could be opened, carried, stored and thrown away. Several inventions from this period still define how drinks and foods reach consumers.

The beverage can is the clearest example. Early beer cans in the 1930s needed a “church key” opener that punched triangular holes in the lid. The story usually told is that in 1959 Ermal Fraze, owner of a tool company in Dayton, Ohio, found himself at a picnic without an opener and resolved to build one into the can. His pull tab, licensed to the aluminium producer Alcoa, first appeared on Iron City beer from the Pittsburgh Brewing Company in the early 1960s. Adoption was rapid; by 1965, by most accounts, around three quarters of American breweries were using pull tabs.

The convenience came with a cost that nobody had designed for: billions of sharp, detachable tabs. They littered beaches, parks and roadsides, injured bare feet and were occasionally swallowed when people dropped them into the can. The fix was the stay-on tab, developed by Daniel Cudzik at Reynolds Metals and introduced in 1975, in which a lever pushes a scored panel into the can and stays attached. Its basic design has changed little since. The history of the pull tab is a compact case study in what engineers call unintended consequences, and it foreshadowed the much larger litter and waste debates that followed.

Plastics changed the rest of the drinks aisle. Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, had been developed as a polyester in Britain in 1941. In 1973 Nathaniel Wyeth, an engineer at DuPont, patented a PET bottle strong enough to hold carbonated drinks. PET bottles were lighter than glass, did not shatter and could be moulded into proprietary shapes. They allowed larger family sizes and, later, single-serve bottles designed for drinking on the move. The lightweight plastic bottle made the drink portable in a way glass never could, and it changed how and where people consumed soft drinks and water.

Other convenience formats followed: the ring-pull food can, the microwaveable tray, the boil-in-bag, the squeezable ketchup bottle, the resealable zip pouch, the single-portion coffee capsule. Each solved a real problem in the kitchen and each added material, complexity or waste to the system. The packaging industry spent these decades designing for the moment of use and largely ignored the moment of disposal.

Convenience packaging also changed what graphics had to do. A product that would be carried, opened and consumed in many settings needed to be recognised on the move and in the hand, not only on the shelf. Brands began designing for the “second moment of truth,” the experience after purchase. Logos had to read on the curved surface of a can held at an angle. Colour had to survive the condensation on a cold bottle. The pack became part of public life, visible on desks, in cars and in photographs.

By the end of the 1970s, three forces were converging on packaging. Convenience had multiplied the number of packs per household. Environmental movements, energised by the first Earth Day in 1970, were starting to treat packaging waste as a public problem. And retailers were about to make every pack readable by machine.

The barcode makes every pack machine-readable

On 26 June 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a cashier scanned a ten-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. It was the first retail scan of a Universal Product Code, the barcode that grocery manufacturers and retailers had agreed on after years of negotiation. GS1 US, the organisation that administers the code, says barcodes now identify more than a billion products and are scanned more than ten billion times a day.

The barcode gave the package a second reader that never gets tired, never misreads a price and never forgets a sale. Before scanning, a pack only had to convince a human. After scanning, it also had to carry a standard machine-readable identifier in a specified position, with enough quiet space around it and enough contrast to scan reliably. Designers lost a portion of every pack to a block of black and white bars, a constraint that has shaped the back panel of almost every product sold since.

The commercial effects reached far beyond the checkout. Scanning produced item-level sales data, which let retailers track exactly what sold, where and when. That data shifted bargaining power from manufacturers to retailers, who could now measure the performance of every pack, every facing and every promotion. Shelf space became something retailers allocated with evidence, and manufacturers had to prove that their packs earned their place. The barcode turned packaging performance from a matter of opinion into a line in a spreadsheet.

Barcodes also enabled automated warehouses, faster checkouts and, later, self-checkout. Each of those developments put new demands on packaging. Self-checkout machines need clear barcodes on every unit, including fresh produce, which pushed more pre-packing of fruit and vegetables. Automated distribution centres need standardised cases and clear identification on outer packaging. Retailers began demanding shelf-ready packaging: cases designed to be opened and placed directly on the shelf, which reduced handling costs but gave brands another surface to design.

The next step is already under way. GS1 has set a global target, known as Sunrise 2027, for retail checkouts to be able to read two-dimensional barcodes, such as QR codes and GS1 DataMatrix, alongside traditional linear codes. A 2D code can carry far more information than a 13-digit product number: batch and expiry data for stock control, links to product information and, through the GS1 Digital Link standard, a web address that consumers can open with a phone. Retailers see benefits in tracking expiry dates and handling recalls; brands see a direct channel to customers. The pack is turning into a door to an online record, and the same code that tells the till the price could tell a shopper the product’s origin, ingredients, recycling instructions or recall status.

The shift has critics. Some retailers argue that 2D codes make sense mainly for fresh and perishable goods and that redesigning every pack is a cost without clear benefit for shelf-stable products. GS1 responds that 2D codes take less space than linear barcodes and can eventually replace several codes on a pack. Either way, the barcode’s history shows that once a machine becomes a reader of packaging, it tends to become the most demanding reader, because machines need standards, and standards tend to become mandatory.

Labelling law takes over the back of the pack

Brand owners control the front of the pack. For most of the twentieth century, governments steadily took control of the rest of it. The history of mandatory labelling is a history of legislators deciding that some information was too important to leave to marketing.

In the United States, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of 1966 required consumer products to state the identity of the product, the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer or distributor, and the net quantity of contents in standard units. It responded to complaints about packs designed to look bigger than their contents and quantities stated in confusing ways. The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 made nutrition labelling mandatory on most packaged foods, and the standardised Nutrition Facts panel appeared on American packs from 1994. That black-and-white box became one of the most widely reproduced pieces of information design in the world.

The European Union consolidated its rules in Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers. It set requirements for mandatory information, a minimum font size, the emphasis of allergens in ingredient lists and, from December 2016, a mandatory nutrition declaration on most prepacked foods. Regulation took a growing share of each pack’s surface and set the typography, order and wording of what appeared there.

Front-of-pack labelling is the current battleground, because the front is where purchase decisions happen. Chile introduced black octagonal warning labels for foods high in sugar, salt, saturated fat or calories in 2016, and several Latin American countries followed with similar schemes. In Europe, several countries adopted the voluntary Nutri-Score letter grade, while others resisted it. Canada made front-of-package nutrition symbols mandatory from 1 January 2026 for foods high in saturated fat, sugars or sodium.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration published a proposed rule on 16 January 2025 that would require a “Nutrition Info box” on the front of most packaged foods, rating saturated fat, sodium and added sugars as low, medium or high. The comment period was extended to July 2025. The agency listed the rule among its 2026 priorities and at one point projected a final rule in spring 2026, but that date passed. As of October 2026, the rule was still a proposal, and the federal regulatory agenda listed a possible final rule for December 2026. Reports in March 2026 quoted FDA Commissioner Martin Makary saying the agency did not like the design it had inherited, so the final shape of any requirement remains uncertain. If finalised in the proposed form, large manufacturers would have three years to comply and smaller ones four.

For brand owners, front-of-pack rules are disruptive in a specific way: they occupy space on the principal display panel and introduce visual elements, often in black and white, that the brand does not control. A carefully composed pack must make room for a regulatory box that may signal “high” next to a product’s appetite appeal. Some brands reformulate products to avoid negative ratings; others redesign packs to make the mandatory element feel integrated.

Labelling law also reaches beyond food. Cosmetics must list ingredients, medicines must carry patient information and child-resistant closures, chemicals must carry hazard pictograms and many products must show recycling or disposal information. Allergen labelling has become a matter of life and death, and the UK’s “Natasha’s Law,” which took effect in October 2021 after a teenager’s fatal reaction to a baguette, requires full ingredient labelling on food prepacked for direct sale. Each law adds a line or a box, and the cumulative effect is that the modern pack is a legal document with a brand on the front.

The pattern has an implication for AI-assisted packaging design. A model can generate attractive front panels in seconds, but the compliance layer, with its exact wording, font minimums, placement rules and jurisdiction-specific variations, is where errors are expensive. The companies getting real value from automation in 2026 are often using it on that compliance layer, checking artwork against rules and translations, rather than on the hero image.

Tobacco plain packaging as a natural experiment

If packaging did not influence buying, governments would not bother to strip it away. The most radical intervention in packaging history did exactly that. Australia’s Tobacco Plain Packaging Act 2011 required that, from 1 December 2012, all tobacco products be sold in standardised packs: a drab dark brown-green colour, no logos or brand imagery, the brand name in a standard font and size, and large graphic health warnings.

The tobacco industry fought the law in Australia’s High Court, which upheld it in 2012, and through investment arbitration and a World Trade Organization dispute brought by several countries. Australia won each case; the WTO panel ruled in June 2018 that the measures were consistent with international trade rules. The legal victories mattered as much as the policy itself, because they established that a government could remove branding from a legal product’s packaging without breaching trade or property law.

Other countries followed. France and the United Kingdom implemented plain packaging in 2017, followed by New Zealand, Norway and Ireland in 2018 and a growing list since. The Canadian Cancer Society’s 2025 international report counted 27 countries and territories that had adopted plain packaging, up from nine in 2018; the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids put the figure at 29. Canada became the first country to require health warnings printed on individual cigarettes, and Australia followed in 2025, along with mandatory health messages inside packs.

The evidence on effects is contested in detail but broadly supportive. Australia’s government conducted a post-implementation review covering December 2012 to September 2015 and estimated that the packaging changes contributed to a decline in smoking prevalence beyond the pre-existing downward trend. The World Health Organization published guidance in 2016 on the evidence, design and implementation of plain packaging. Separating the effect of plain packs from that of the larger health warnings introduced at the same time is difficult, a limitation researchers acknowledge.

For packaging professionals outside tobacco, plain packaging is a natural experiment in the power of design. Governments and courts accepted, on the evidence, that branded packaging makes a product more appealing, distracts from warnings and can mislead about harm. That conclusion validates what brand owners have always believed about their own packs. It also creates a precedent that health advocates now cite in debates about alcohol, foods high in sugar and other products.

The tobacco case also shows how packaging can be regulated without banning a product. Removing branding leaves the product legal but strips it of the distinctive assets that brand owners spent decades building. For any category that faces public-health scrutiny, the lesson is that the pack itself can become the policy target, and that the line between information requirements and design restrictions can move.

Recycling arrows, green dots and the pack as an environmental claim

The first Earth Day, on 22 April 1970, gave packaging an environmental identity it has never shed. That year the Container Corporation of America, a large producer of recycled paperboard, ran a design contest for art and architecture students. More than 500 entries came in. The winner was Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old student at the University of Southern California, whose design of three chasing arrows in a loop became the universal recycling symbol. The company applied for a trademark, but the application was challenged and abandoned, which left the symbol in the public domain.

That decision made the recycling arrows free for anyone to use, and their meaning drifted. The symbol was created to mark recycled paperboard. It came to appear on packs made of materials that most collection systems did not recycle, often inside a resin identification code that told sorters what plastic a container was made of but said nothing about whether it would actually be recycled. Consumers read the arrows as a promise. Regulators have spent decades trying to narrow the gap between the symbol’s implied claim and the reality of waste systems.

Germany took a different route. Its 1991 Packaging Ordinance made manufacturers and retailers responsible for taking back and recovering packaging, and industry created a collective system, Der Grüne Punkt, whose green dot logo signalled that a fee had been paid for the pack’s collection and recovery. The green dot spread across Europe as a licence mark for producer responsibility schemes, and like the recycling arrows it was widely misread by consumers as meaning “recyclable.” Extended producer responsibility, the principle that the maker pays for the end of the pack’s life, began there and is now standard across the European Union.

The environmental era added new claims to the front of packs: “recyclable,” “compostable,” “made with recycled content,” “plastic-free,” “carbon neutral.” Some of these claims were accurate and useful. Many were vague, selective or unprovable. Environmental claims on packaging became one of the main targets of consumer protection enforcement in the 2020s. In Europe, the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive restricts generic environmental claims and claims based on carbon offsetting, and the packaging regulation that began applying in August 2026 moves towards harmonised, verifiable recycling labels.

The packaging industry has also seen changes in materials that carry their own marketing. Brands replaced plastic with paper-based alternatives, introduced refill formats, reduced material weight and announced recycled-content targets. Several high-profile pledges have since been scaled back as costs rose and recycled plastic supply proved tighter than expected. A pack that announces its environmental virtue now invites scrutiny from regulators, activists and journalists.

For designers, the environmental chapter adds a constraint that cuts across aesthetics. Metallic inks, laminates, full-body shrink sleeves, mixed materials and dark colours that confuse optical sorting machines can all reduce recyclability. Some of the strongest attention-grabbing techniques in shelf design are the ones most likely to fail a recyclability assessment. The European rules make that conflict concrete by tying market access to recyclability grades from 2030.

Tropicana and the cost of erasing a cue

No packaging case is cited more often in marketing classrooms than Tropicana’s 2009 redesign, and the reason is that it produced unusually clean numbers. In January 2009 PepsiCo, which then owned Tropicana, rolled out new cartons for Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice designed by the Arnell Group. The new design replaced the long-familiar image of an orange pierced by a straw with a close-up of a glass of juice, rotated the wordmark to run vertically and changed the cap.

Shoppers reacted fast. The New York Times reported a flood of complaints, including one email asking whether the designers actually shopped for orange juice, because the writer did and found the new cartons awful. Many said the new pack looked like a store brand. Then the sales data arrived. According to Information Resources Inc. figures reported by Advertising Age and Bloomberg, unit sales of Tropicana Pure Premium fell 20 percent and dollar sales fell 19 percent, about $33 million, between 1 January and 22 February 2009. On 23 February the company announced it would return to the old design. Competing brands and private labels gained share during the period.

The product had not changed. Only the pack had, and the change removed the single cue that shoppers used to find the brand in a crowded chiller cabinet. The orange with a straw was a compact, distinctive symbol that said “fresh orange juice from Tropicana” at a glance. The glass of juice said “orange juice” in general. Tropicana swapped a distinctive asset for a descriptive image, and descriptive images belong to the whole category.

The case is useful because it isolates variables. The juice, price and distribution were the same; only the packaging changed; and the loss was large, immediate and measurable. That makes it rare evidence that packaging alone can move sales by double digits. It also explains why large brands now test redesigns more cautiously and why design agencies invoke “distinctive brand assets” in nearly every pitch.

Tropicana had a second encounter with the problem in 2024, under different owners. PepsiCo sold a majority of its juice brands to the private equity firm PAI Partners in 2021, creating Tropicana Brands Group. In 2024 the company replaced its 52-ounce Pure Premium carafe, introduced in 2011, with a smaller 46-ounce bottle of a simpler shape. Using Circana data, CNN reported year-on-year sales declines of 8.3 percent in July, 10.9 percent in August and 19 percent by October 2024. Consumers complained about shrinkflation, although the company said it had lowered the suggested retail price.

A packaging research firm, Designalytics, surveyed 1,035 refrigerated juice buyers in September 2024 and found a committed preference of 31 percent for the old carafe against 13 percent for the new bottle. Its chief executive argued that at least 40 percent of validated redesigns result in persistent sales losses, a figure that comes from a vendor with a commercial interest in pre-launch testing and should be read in that light. Even so, two failures fifteen years apart at the same brand point to the same rule: when a pack changes, the cues shoppers rely on must survive the change.

The Tropicana lessons are directly relevant to AI-assisted redesign. Generative tools make it easy to produce visually appealing alternatives, and appeal is exactly what the 2009 design had. What it lacked was continuity with the memory structures that shoppers used to find the product. Any testing method, human or machine, that asks “which design do you like?” without asking “can you find the brand quickly?” risks repeating the mistake.

Shrinkflation and the trust ledger

Every package makes a quiet promise about quantity. A shopper who buys the same pack every week assumes it holds roughly what it held last time. When manufacturers reduce the contents while keeping the pack and price the same, a practice now universally called shrinkflation, they draw down a store of trust that packaging has built up over decades.

Shrinkflation is not new; manufacturers have adjusted pack sizes for as long as there have been standard packs. What changed in the early 2020s was the scale and the scrutiny. Food inflation across Europe and North America pushed brands to protect price points by reducing contents, and consumers armed with phones, unit-price labels and social media began documenting the changes. The package became evidence in a public argument about fairness.

France turned that argument into law. From 1 July 2024, supermarkets with a sales area over 400 square metres that mainly sell food must tell shoppers when a prepackaged product’s quantity has fallen and its price per unit has risen. A notice on the pack or near it must state how much the quantity has fallen and how much the unit price has risen, in percentage or euros, and it must be displayed for two months after the reduced product goes on sale. An amended order extended the rule to multipacks where the number of units falls. Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire called shrinkflation a scam. The consumer group UFC-Que Choisir found that 95 percent of stores it checked were not complying in the first week, which suggests that enforcement, not drafting, will decide the law’s effect.

The French rule puts the burden on retailers rather than brands, but brands bear the reputational cost. A notice beside a product announcing that it now contains less is a form of negative packaging, a label the brand did not design. Several retailers in Europe had already started shelf campaigns naming brands they accused of shrinkflation, turning the issue into a weapon in price negotiations.

For packaging designers, shrinkflation raises a subtle problem. Pack sizes are often reduced without changing the outer dimensions, by adding air, deeper punts in bottles, thicker walls or smaller fill levels. Those techniques now collide with regulation. The European packaging regulation’s limits on empty space and its ban on features that make a pack look bigger than its contents make some of the classic shrinkflation tricks illegal from 2030. Consumer protection law in several countries already treats deceptive slack fill as an offence.

The deeper lesson is that packaging consistency, which builds memory and trust, can be turned against the brand if the contents change underneath it. Shoppers who discover that a familiar pack holds less feel that the pack itself lied. Brands that reduce quantity and change the pack design at the same time, so that the change is visible, tend to face less backlash than those that hide it. Transparency is cheaper than recovery.

Amazon, wrap rage and the box that ships itself

E-commerce turned the outer carton, which most shoppers had never seen, into the first thing they touch. It also exposed the gap between packaging designed for a shelf and packaging designed for a delivery network. A product built to stand out behind a clear plastic clamshell and survive shoplifters makes no sense when it is already paid for and travels inside a brown box.

Amazon addressed this in November 2008 with Frustration-Free Packaging, launched with 19 products from manufacturers including Fisher-Price, Mattel, Microsoft and Transcend. The programme targeted “wrap rage,” the frustration and occasional injuries caused by hard plastic clamshells and wire ties. Products in the programme came in easy-to-open, recyclable packaging and often shipped without an extra Amazon box. In 2017 the company said its packaging programmes had eliminated 181,000 tons of packaging material and avoided 307 million shipping boxes since launch, figures that come from Amazon itself and are not independently verified.

The programme changed who set packaging requirements for a large share of consumer goods. Amazon introduced certification tiers and, later, financial incentives and penalties that encouraged manufacturers to design packs that could ship in their own container. A brand that sold mainly through e-commerce now had to design for drop tests, vibration in delivery vans and automated handling in fulfilment centres, not just for shelf appeal.

E-commerce also created the “digital shelf,” the product image on a retailer’s website or app. There, a pack appears as a small thumbnail, often on a phone screen, beside dozens of competing thumbnails. Fine print disappears, small logos blur and subtle colour differences vanish. Brands began adjusting packs and creating special “hero images” with simplified layouts, larger brand marks and visible size and variant cues. Packaging is now designed for two shelves at once, one physical and one made of pixels, and the requirements do not always agree.

The delivery box itself became a branding surface. Subscription services and direct-to-consumer brands printed logos, messages and patterns on mailers and inside lids, treating the moment of opening as a marketing event. That tendency collided with concerns about waste, especially when small items arrived in oversized boxes with void fill. European rules now target that directly: from 2030, grouped, transport and e-commerce packaging must keep empty space to a maximum ratio of 50 percent.

The shift to e-commerce also accelerated the move from plastic to paper in many categories, because corrugated board is easier for consumers to recycle and works well with automated packing. Paper-based mailers, moulded fibre inserts and paper tape replaced bubble wrap and plastic air pillows in many shipments. The structural innovation of the 2010s happened largely in the shipping box, not on the shelf.

Unboxing, premium cues and the pack as a stage

Packaging once ended its job at the till. The rise of online video gave it a second performance in front of an audience. “Unboxing” videos, in which a person films themselves opening a new product, became a popular genre on YouTube in the late 2000s and spread across every platform that followed. Phones, game consoles, cosmetics, toys and luxury goods were opened slowly, layer by layer, for viewers who might never buy them.

Apple is the brand most associated with treating the opening of a box as part of the product. Its packaging for the iPod, iPhone and Mac used tight-fitting rigid boxes that slid open slowly, minimal printing, white surfaces and carefully placed components, so that the device was the first thing seen when the lid came off. The company’s design approach made opening the box a ritual, and competitors in consumer electronics copied the formula. Apple later reworked its boxes to remove plastic film and reduce size, showing that the premium ritual could survive a material diet.

Premium packaging relies on cues that shoppers read as quality, often without noticing them: weight, rigidity, the friction of a lid, matte or soft-touch coatings, embossing, foil and the sound of a magnetic closure. These are Cheskin’s sensation transference translated into structure. A heavier bottle signals a better spirit. A rigid box signals a gift. A slow-sliding lid signals care. Luxury houses have used such cues for generations, and the colour of a box itself can become a protected asset: Tiffany’s blue box is a registered colour mark, and Hermès orange is recognised across the luxury trade.

The unboxing era added a measurement problem. A premium opening experience is hard to quantify in a spreadsheet, and its costs are easy to see: heavier materials, more components, slower packing lines and more waste. Brands now weigh the marketing value of an opening ritual against regulations that cap empty space and require minimised packaging. The premium pack is becoming an exercise in doing more with less, using structure, paper engineering and print finishes rather than layers of plastic and filler.

Social media also changed who designs for the moment of opening. Influencer kits, limited editions and press boxes are built to be photographed, and they often look nothing like the retail pack. That split between a mass pack and a shareable pack is likely to widen as AI tools make small runs of customised packaging cheaper to design, and as digital printing makes them cheaper to produce.

Personalisation from names on bottles to 7 million Nutella jars

For most of its history, mass packaging meant identical packaging. Printing plates, cylinders and long press runs made every unit the same, and that sameness was part of the promise: the product in Sydney matched the product in Stockholm. Digital printing broke that link. Once presses could change the image on every sheet or label without new plates, a pack could vary from unit to unit at little extra cost.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, which began in Australia in 2011, replaced the brand name on bottles and cans with popular first names. The campaign spread to dozens of countries and became one of the best-known examples of personalised packaging. It worked because the brand’s distinctive assets, the red, the script typography and the contour, stayed in place while the most familiar word on the pack changed. Personalisation succeeded because it played with the brand’s recognisability rather than replacing it.

Algorithmic variation went further. In February 2017 Ferrero and the agency Ogilvy & Mather Italia released Nutella Unica, a limited edition of 7 million jars sold in Italy, each with a different label design. An algorithm drew from a database of dozens of patterns and thousands of colour combinations to generate the labels, and each jar carried a unique code that identified it as one of a kind. The agency reported that the jars sold out in about a month, and Ferrero ran similar editions in other markets afterwards. Diet Coke and Absolut had run earlier algorithmic label projects, but Nutella Unica’s scale made it the reference case.

The project is a useful precursor to generative AI because it separated the parts of a pack that must stay fixed from the parts that can vary. The Nutella logo, the jar shape, the white lid and the legal text stayed the same. Only the decorative field changed. Variation was allowed only where it could not damage recognition or compliance, a principle that remains the safest way to use AI in packaging today.

Personalised packaging carries production and logistics costs. Variable labels complicate inventory, quality control and recalls, because a batch can no longer be identified by its appearance. Retailers may resist packs that look different from what their planograms show. And novelty fades: a campaign that delights once can feel like a gimmick the second time. Most brands now use personalisation as a limited-edition tool rather than a permanent strategy. The digital print market supports that pattern; Smithers estimates the global value of digitally printed packaging and labels at $22 billion in 2025, rising to about $36.9 billion by 2030, still a small share of total packaging print.

Generative AI enters the packaging studio

Generative AI arrived in packaging through marketing stunts before it reached production lines, and the stunts reveal what the technology does well. In August 2022 Heinz and its agency Rethink asked DALL-E 2, then in limited access, to generate images of ketchup from prompts such as “ketchup in outer space” and “renaissance ketchup bottle.” The campaign reported that the outputs consistently looked like Heinz bottles, with the keystone label and the distinctive shape. Heinz turned the images into advertising, a metaverse gallery and a limited run of bottles with AI-generated labels. The work won awards at Cannes and the Clios, and the agency claimed that OpenAI later adjusted the model to reduce brand bias, a claim made in award entries rather than confirmed by OpenAI.

The Heinz experiment demonstrated that decades of consistent packaging leave a trace inside AI models. A model trained on billions of images learns the most frequent visual association for a category, and for ketchup that association was a specific brand’s bottle. Some sceptical viewers who tried similar prompts reported different results, and the campaign’s selection of images was obviously curated. Even so, the principle holds: distinctive packaging that appears everywhere becomes part of what machines think a category looks like.

Coca-Cola moved from experiment to product in September 2023 with Coca-Cola Y3000, a limited-edition flavour in its Creations range that the company described as co-created with human and artificial intelligence. Coca-Cola said it used consumer insights about how people imagine the future, then used AI to help develop flavour pairings and to generate images for a mood board that guided the can design. The can, in violet, magenta and cyan on silver with a pixel-like treatment of the script logo, carried the words “Co-Created with AI” and a QR code linking to an AI-powered experience. The design was still finalised by people; AI served as an ideation and inspiration tool.

Since then, generative tools have moved into the everyday workflow of packaging design. Image generators produce concept boards and mock-ups. Design software vendors have added generative features: Adobe has extended its Firefly tools with packaging-oriented templates, and prepress and colour-management suppliers such as Esko have added AI features to their platforms. Structural design tools use algorithms to propose box shapes that use less material, and simulation software tests how a pack will perform under compression or in transit before anything is printed.

The most consequential uses are often the least visible. Packaging Dive reported in 2025 that Nestlé was using generative AI in research and development to identify new high-barrier packaging materials, and that other consumer goods companies were using AI to simulate testing, assess recyclability and produce prototypes. AI is doing more work on materials, compliance and artwork management than on the hero image people see on the shelf. Artwork versioning across dozens of languages and markets, checking that mandatory text matches regulations and catching errors before plates are made are slow, costly and error-prone tasks where automation has a clear payoff.

The market numbers are large but uncertain. Smithers values the global packaging market at about $1.2 trillion in 2025 and expects it to reach $1.52 trillion by 2030, growing at roughly 3.5 to 3.8 percent a year, and has flagged generative AI as a driver of faster product launches and design productivity. Separate estimates of the “AI in packaging design” market come from commercial research firms with varying methods and should be treated as indicative rather than precise.

What generative AI changes most is the cost of options. A brand team that once reviewed five design routes can now review fifty in the same time. That abundance is useful for exploration and dangerous for decision-making, because the bottleneck moves from generating ideas to judging them. The Tropicana lesson applies with more force when alternatives are cheap: the easier it is to produce attractive redesigns, the more discipline a brand needs to protect what shoppers already recognise.

Synthetic consumers and the limits of predicted preference

Packaging research has always been expensive and slow. Shelf tests, eye-tracking studies, in-home use tests and quantitative surveys take weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars per round. AI vendors promise to compress that. Some tools predict where shoppers will look on a pack or a shelf image using models trained on eye-tracking data. Others score designs for brand visibility and appeal. Vizit, one such company, has claimed up to 90 percent predictive accuracy for consumer preferences in packaging and product imagery tests, a vendor claim reported by Packaging Digest.

The newest approach goes further: “synthetic consumers” or “digital twins,” in which large language models are prompted to act as shoppers of a given age, income or attitude and asked to react to packs, claims and prices. The appeal is obvious. A brand can test hundreds of variants overnight against hundreds of simulated personas without recruiting anyone.

The academic evidence on synthetic consumers is cautious, and in places sharply critical. A 2026 paper on innovation with generative AI reviewed the research and identified three recurring problems. The first is heterogeneity loss: even models fine-tuned on demographically stratified human data tend to recover population averages while producing incoherent differences between segments. The second is prompt-induced confounding: the way a scenario is described to a model can shape its answers in ways that a human experiment would control for. The third is a failure to reproduce irrational behaviour. Digital twins tend to choose the “normative” option far more often than real people and do not show biases such as the sunk-cost fallacy that real consumers display.

That last finding matters for packaging in particular. Much of what packaging does works through quick, intuitive and sometimes irrational responses: colour associations, familiarity, perceived weight, a reassuring shape. Cheskin built his career on the gap between what people said and what they did. A simulated respondent that answers like a reasonable person may systematically underweight exactly those effects. Earlier work by Gui and Toubia, cited in that review, benchmarked GPT-4 against an experiment in which human respondents evaluated consumer packaged goods at randomised prices, and highlighted the difficulty of making simulated responses behave like real ones when the experimental manipulation is embedded in the prompt.

Other AI uses in research are more grounded. Researchers at Michigan State University described in April 2026 a system called PackSense that combines rule-based and generative AI to extract information from online product reviews: which packaging components failed, how severe the damage was and how customers reacted emotionally. Mining what real customers already said is a sturdier use of AI than inventing what simulated customers might say. Such tools turn millions of unstructured reviews into evidence about damage in transit, opening problems and frustration.

The practical conclusion for brand owners is to use AI screening to narrow options and real-world testing to decide. A machine score can eliminate weak routes cheaply; it cannot yet replace a properly designed test with real shoppers who find, pick up and buy the product. The cost of a failed redesign, as Tropicana showed, is measured in tens of millions of dollars, far more than the cost of a rigorous test.

Ownership of an AI-drawn label

Brand owners spend heavily on packaging because they expect to own it. Copyright protects original artwork, trade mark law protects distinctive signs and design rights protect the appearance of products and packs in many jurisdictions. Generative AI unsettles the first of these and complicates the others.

On 29 January 2025, the US Copyright Office published Part 2 of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence, dealing with copyrightability. The Office concluded that material generated entirely by AI is not protected by copyright and that prompts alone, however detailed, do not give the user enough control over the output to count as authorship. It also concluded that copyright can still protect human contributions: human-authored material that is perceptible in an AI output, creative selection and arrangement of AI-generated elements, and creative modifications a person makes to an output. The Office noted that other countries that have addressed the question so far agree that copyright requires human authorship.

For packaging, this produces a practical rule. A label illustration produced from a prompt and used unchanged may have no copyright protection in the United States, which means a competitor could copy that illustration without infringing copyright. A label where designers substantially redraw, combine and arrange AI-generated material, and where the human contribution is documented, stands on firmer ground. Agencies and brand owners have begun keeping records of which elements were generated, which were drawn and how they were changed, so that they can show human authorship if challenged.

Trade mark law offers a different route. A trade mark does not require originality in the copyright sense; it requires distinctiveness and use in trade. A logo or pack design generated with AI can still become a registered trade mark once it identifies a brand. The risk lies elsewhere: an AI tool trained on existing packaging may produce designs that resemble other companies’ marks or trade dress, exposing the brand to infringement claims. The Heinz experiment shows how strongly models can gravitate towards the dominant brand in a category. A new ketchup brand that asks a model for “a classic ketchup bottle label” may get something uncomfortably close to Heinz.

Contracts now matter more. Brand owners now ask agencie

This article was prepared with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools. The content underwent expert human review, and Webiano Digital & Marketing Agency assumes editorial responsibility for its final version and publication.