in my opinion, store brands typically give even less attention to packaging function than they do to what the packages look like. publix, though, clearly spends more time than most on its packaging. i would imagine it pays off for them, too. if customers feel just as comfortable — if not more comfortable — with the store brand, they will buy the store brand more often and also shop at the store more often.

as for this bag’s looks, it’s not bad at all. it uses the photo approach commonly seen on this kind of product, and again puts typographical emphasis on descriptive words rather than product name. i wonder why they didn’t choose to focus on “california blend” since that’s the description that sets the product apart from others near it on the shelf. however, since the bag is in and of itself a selling point, perhaps they wanted to use the type to advertise it.

anyway, this post’s featured product, Crunchy Rice, is a fairly new version of Kellogg’s Special K. here at the PublixPackaging household, we’re excited. special k is one of our favorite cereals, but we’re frugal shoppers and special k is expensive. i picked up a box of CrunchyRice recently, and it’s not bad. frankly, it’s not as good as the brand-name counterpart in my opinion, but it’s similar.

packaging-wise, the emphasis the title places on the descriptive words “crunchy rice” works for me. i suppose it’s still technically the descriptive word, but when you’re in an aisle full of a single product category, it makes a little more sense to emphasize adjectives rather than the nouns themselves. i guess. my jury is still out on that one. thoughts?

this little gem is my husband’s new favorite food (yep, that’s right, there’s a Mr. PublixPackaging now!). well, truly the vanilla flavor is his all-time fav, but the Publix I stopped at on my way home today was all out. Personally, though, i prefer the blueberry on the rare occasion that a yogurt mood strikes me.

the packaging design is an example of one of the first layouts we saw several years ago. it lacks the “punny” tagline, and instead relies upon a sketch of the item’s primary ingredient (in this case, a trio of blueberries). it’s also an example of Publix’s tendency to focus on the item’s descriptive word instead of the item name itself. i realize several very educated and experience people likely articulated a system long ago for choosing which words to highlight; i just don’t get it. in this case, i think i would have focused on yogurt — or maybe “blueberry yogurt” — and relied on consistency of design in the rest of the product line to immediately convey the rest.

Tonight I spent a fair amount of time juicing oranges from my in-laws’ orange tree with a manual juicer. Don’t get me wrong; the process yields juice unlike anything found in stores. But as I squeezed citrus fruit tonight, I couldn’t help but think how easy it would have been to have purchased the newly packaged premium Publix orange juice.

In fact, just a week or two ago, I had on my grocery list Simply Orange. It’s a great juice. Very natural. But on that shopping day, I noticed that Simply Orange used fruit from Brazil. Publix premium OJ, however, was all American. And so I purchased Publix premium OJ.

They’ve recently begun a redesign of the Publix premium line. Makes it a little easier to buy the products, IMHO. What do you think?

To our loyal fans, we offer a long-overdue apology: It’s been more than four years since we last posted. (Can you believe how time flies?!) moving forward, we promise frequent posts about a campaign that still stops us in our tracks as we meander through the aisles of America’s best grocery store. We’ve also got plans to add a bargain-watch/couponing section in the near future, so be sure to keep an eye out for that.

So for this first post back after a long hiatus, we want to again draw attention to the box of a certain cheese-flavored cracker. (Yes, it’s worth mentioning again.) Publix calls them Cheddar Cheesy’s. We say that’s WRONG, Publix, WRONG! Where are your grammar nerds?! Where are your editorial geniuses?! Every other package we’ve seen from you is a work of art… But this one commits apostrophe abuse. The crackers don’t belong to a character named Cheddar Cheesy, do they? It’s been five years since we first posted on this topic, and still the glaring error remains. Every time we’ve shopped in the last five years, we’ve stopped by the cookie and cracker aisle, just to see if it’s fixed yet. But alas, no. Please, Publix… Fix this error!

On the pecans, the line reads “Pecan-can.” The white flood on the bag leaves three strategically shaped areas open, and a simple sketch completes the picture of three pecans dancing. Clever! Some of us can also feel vindicated by the confirmation of correct pronunciation—after all, if the nuts are going to dance, they’re not going to do the “cahn-can!”

Onto more important matters…the highlighted attribute of this title is “PecanHalves.” There’s no subtitle, and they use the two-color sans-serif variation on the title. The walnuts have a similar setup. “Walnuts” is the emphasized word, and the line reads “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall-nut.” (Awesome.) There’s a matching sketch. But the sliced almonds take a different approach. The transparent area of the bag is in the shape of a cleaver, and the tagline is “Slice, slice baby” This is all amazing. But the emphasized word is “sliced.” What’s that about? Seems to me that “almonds” should have the emphasis to keep in line with the rest of the nuts.

But, the choice of emphasis words has long confused me. It’s sure not a decision I’d like to make, because sometimes one word is more fitting than another. But at least within the same product line—if not the entire line—make it consistent!

Lest I lose sight of my original impression, though, these nuts are amazing. The taglines are great!

Publix rolled out the new packaging on baking chips several months ago. With the new packaging came a few new varieties of chips, too, I believe, making the store line fully competitive with the name brand options.

For the most part, the coloring on the Publix chips is consistent with general perception of what the product’s color is. For example, the butterscotch package uses a yellow-orange shade, the milk-chocolate package uses a rich and creamy brown color, etc. But the one pictured here— semi-sweet—uses a red color. As the comment a few posts back mentioned, this makes it look like strawberry chips or something! I suppose they chose the red color because brown is on the milk-chocolate chips, but what about using a second shade of brown? (Like the old light-brown / dark-brown M&M’s!)

Overall, though, this package is great. They used an illustration of the product, but no witty humor like on the snack products. I think this is indicative of when they designed the package, though—only the newer packages have the humor. Plus, this is in the baking products category, and most of the baking products use a similar strategy.

Publix had a pretty extensive line of canned vegetables already, so this is not one of the areas where we see a lot of new products introduced with the new packaging. I think the selection has expanded a little bit, though. For example, I could be mistaken, but I believe there are more vegetables with reduced salt or no salt at all.

The packaging is consistent with the other products in this general category: a serif font for the emphasized product word combined with a traditional product shot. I appreciate that the designers picked colors corresponding to the products when selecting the colors to use on the labels. I would imagine it was a little tricky to select several distinguishable shades of green, but they pulled it off rather well. The cans are infinitely better than the previous store brand version, and in my opinion they’re now better looking than the brand names, too. And as always, the products themselves taste great and can compete nicely with the so-called real thing.

The only part of this packaging that I object to is the same thing I often object to: the word choice for the emphasized part. Notice in this picture that the middle can is labeled as “No Salt.” Lots of the vegetables have no-salt varieties now, and lots are green as well. (Different shades of green, though.) It’s hard to tell what the product is from a distance. It makes the shopper pick up the can and read it carefully to make sure it’s the desired product. In this specific case, it’s kind of hard to tell whether the can contains green beans or peas. (I think it’s peas.) The emphasis works better on the top can (“French Style”), but that’s because there’s only one vegetable that that phrase applies to: green beans. I’m sure it must be a hard decision, though, because I recognize that if the vegetable names were highlighted, a similar quandary would result. Instead of struggling to differentiate peas from beans, shoppers would have to work to identify the particular style of beans, etc. An interesting problem…

The house built from crackers is a great way of showing the product. It’s also a great setup for the tagline “Honey, I’m home.”

I’ve ranted before about using the descriptive word as the highlight, thus forcing shoppers to read the fine print to know what the product is. In this case, though, it works out well. “Honey Graham” probably is the best thing to highlight. Makes it easy to see at a glance that the box contains graham crackers. Odd, isn’t it? Not sure what the best method is overall. Consistency is typically key, but not in this case. Perhaps some rewriting is in order so that each product can be emphasized in the same manner.

You can tell at first glance that the design is one of the older ones: It’s a line drawing of the products. That was an earlier technique. They used a sans-serif font throughout, which is also a sign of its age. But the thing that really gives it away is that they used all capital letters—this is a dead giveaway.

Each variety features a different color, but a similar image. This is another example of featuring the adjective rather than the product, though in this case I think that works. “40 Watt” speaks to lightbulbs, but “Junior” could be anything. (See aforementioned rant.) Another great piece!