25/1/99

New! Improved!

    There's a visual revolution going on: from buses to tea boxes, product packaging is an awakening art form in Israel.
    Egged red has given way to mauve; Wissotzky yellow is now blood-red; the smiling Tami mama is relegated to quaint nostalgia.
    Packaging is an overlooked art, but one that assaults and asserts everywhere we look.
    "Packaging?" Shalom Bentley laughs. "Some guy at a party said to me, who cares? He was drinking a can of  Coke, and I said, what's this? Ahh, that's not packaging, he said. If it's not, I told him, your drink would run out all over the floor. Who thinks of it?"
    Bentley does. It's his job, at the semi-governmental Institute for Advancement of Packaging and Design, in Tel Aviv.
    "Packaging is a silent salesman. It fights for space and recognition on the supermarket shelves, it screams at you.
    "I must say, Israeli graphics are better than ever before. First class." There's a good reason, says the ex-Londoner. "More imports are coming in; the multinationals are buying Israeli companies, it's a phenomenon now. European ideas are flooding the country, and the message to Israelis is, you've got to be up to our standards."
    Tami used to be one of the biggest food producers, yet they couldn't be bothered to change the packaging: that smiling young mama - by now she's probably a grandmother - beamed benignly from the most basic style of printed carton packaging. But Tami was swallowed up by Best Foods, a multinational, and joined the revolution.
    Like the old ג€œSaturday Night Liveג€ skit - "We're AT&T - we don't have to care" - the Israeli monopolies had their day, and it didn't matter what they threw at us, we had to buy it. But now, aha, they're jostling for attention with foreign and impressive local brands. They've been brought down.
    "Tnuva's image has changed; it's no longer food from the kibbutz; Wissotzky is trying to project a new image of quality, and they've opened tea houses." There is one interesting exception: the Elite cow. It hasn't changed one iota, and Elite is emphasizing it as a stalwart of old-fashioned Israeli goodness. With such a vast array of chocolates to choose from nowadays, "You look for something new, so you look for something old," says Bentley.
    We are so much more sophisticated, he stresses. "More Israelis are traveling abroad, and they know what a big, flashy supermarket looks like. They want all their produce under one roof, easily accessible, good to look at, fresh. We've done very well to meet that demand -- especially because the market is small. I was in India a couple of years ago, where there's almost a billion people compared to our six million, and the packaging is still what it was in England in the 1950s. They have no supermarkets."
    He shows me a little container for Bulgarian cheese when I ask for examples of packaging he admires. "It's an Israeli idea, very clever.  The cheese, soaking in brine, sits in a little basket, so you don't have to fish around for the pieces." That's an example of the stale old monopolies getting innovative: the cheese is Tnuva's, bearing the Piraeus label.
    "What do you think of this?" he asks, displaying a curvacious Spring fruit juice bottle. Not much, I say. "Yeah, it's garish, brash. But clever. It jumps out at you from the shelf." He points out the genius of the packaging: the product is covered with shrink wrap, but because it's cello-shaped, the printing has to be distorted, because when it's applied to the bottle, it expands in different widths, which compensates for the distortion. Osem has a new tomato sauce jar with the same concept. 
    Most of the packages in his storeroom battle for attention with ever-wilder color; amazingly, a plain old wooden box stands out by contrast. "That's the Katzrin Chardonnay. Daring to be plain. The packaging sells wine as something traditional, antique. It says look, I'm expensive, but good." Bentley chuckles. "On this you don't want shrink wrap!"
    Among his peeves are milk bags. "Germany tried it and didn't go for it. The only place it continued was here. I hate it. You have to put it in a special thing, and you have to cut it and it spurts, and spills over into that holder and it reeks after a while. I hate any packaging where you have to get scissors to open it, and if you can't be bothered, you use your teeth, and you tear too much, and the product spills out everywhere.
    "And packaging for things like chips or nuts: you don't want to eat it all in one go, and you want to keep it fresh, but you can't reseal it." On the other hand, the problem with shrink wrap is you can't unseal it.
    An innovation we should see here in the near future is yet another kind of Coke bottle, not long after they introduced plastic in the shape of the classic glass. "They ran a competition for a can to look like the old bottle. They succeeded, it was a big technical feat."
    It might seem like a gamble to resist change, but Coke - like the Elite cow - has trained the eye to notice it. It doesn't matter if you miss that red-and-white swirl in the soft-drinks display; you know it's there. But then why, I asked Bentley, did Egged change its visual identity by painting over its classic, familiar red? "But that's different," he smiles. "You can't miss a bus."