Packaging as Content | Box Vox

June 15, 2020

My pandemic packaging prize

packaging prize

Silver A’ Design Award (packaging prize)

I won a packaging prize in April, during the peak of the pandemic, here in NYC. Under normal circumstances I probably would have announced it much sooner. (See also: tone-deaf crowing) But this was not your normal, idyllic April in New York.

Of course, the coronavirus was also taking a heavy toll in Italy, where the A’Design Award is based. Oddly, however, there was no mention of the pandemic on their website. Indeed, they were acting as if this were any other year. As if we “winners” might like to fly to Como to attend their glamorous La Notte Premio A. (an Award Ceremony and Gala-Night.)

It’s not clear to me, whether this event has actually taken place or if it’s been rescheduled for some time in the future. But either way, it’s a moot point. I would be watching Cuomo—not flying to Como.

Finally, although, I’ve never been what you’d call a “prize-winning” designer, I do recall winning at least one other design award…

(Which I will tell you all about next time.)

April 18, 2020

John Horton Conway: December 26, 1937 – April 11, 2020

John Horton Conway with polyhedral models in his Princeton U. office, 1993 (photo by Dith Pran for The New York Times)

Covid-19 killed 13,000+ people last week, according to data from The Covid Tracking Project. Among them was John Horton Conway.

It was xkcd’s animated gif “RIP John Conway” that first alerted me to his death. While saddened to learn of his death, I was struck by the poetic aptness of xkcd’s [Randall Munroe’s] tribute.

At times, Conway bemoaned the popularity of his game — over his numerous other achievements in pure mathematics. Although you can also find plenty of interviews where he patiently explains the rules and implications of LIFE.

Like many, I’d first learned of Conway (and “LIFE”), when I read Stephen Levy’s book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

He’d described how students, working with mainframe computers at M.I.T. in the 1970s, became completely absorbed in Conway’s so-called game. Rereading that passage now, the rules of LIFE (highlighted below) now remind me of social distancing. Six feet apart vs. six feet under.

The principle of isolation and crowding in LIFE

LIFE was a game, a computer simulation developed by John Conway, a distinguished British mathematician. It was first described by Martin Gardner, in his “Mathematical Games” column in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American. The game consists of markers on a checkerboard-like field, each marker representing a “cell.” The pattern of cells changes with each move in the game (called a “generation”) depending on a few simple rules—cells die, are born, or survive to the next generation according to how many neighboring cells are in the vicinity. The principle is that isolated cells die of loneliness, and crowded cells die from overpopulation …

[Bill] Gosper first saw the game when he came into the lab … and found two hackers fooling around with it on the PDP-6. He watched for a while. …Then he watched the patterns take shape a while longer. Gosper …appreciated how the specific bandwidth of the human eyeball could interpret patterns; he would often use weird algorithms to generate a display based on mathematical computations. What would appear to be random numbers on paper could be brought to life on a computer screen. A certain order could be discerned, an order that would change in an interesting way if you took the algorithm a few iterations further, or alternated the X and y patterns. It was soon clear to Gosper that LIFE presented these possibilities and more. He began working with a few AI workers to hack LIFE in an extremely serious way. He was to do almost nothing else for the next eighteen months.

It’s ironic, of course, that, because of the game’s analogies to life and death, it now seems inevitable that LIFE (the game) should figure so prominently in Conway’s online epitaph. [Read more…]

March 31, 2020

Packaging in the News: our egg carton featured in Inc.

Inc. published a short feature this month about our Baker’s Dozen Egg Carton. Ordinarily, I might have indulged in an exclamation-pointed announcement about this. I’m duly flattered, of course, to be mentioned in a national publication.

It seems moot (even tone-deaf) however, for me to be crowing about business publicity during our shared global pandemic. But, if not now, when?…

Remaking a Classic Packaging Design

The 13-egg carton was a design exercise for Randy Ludacer.
Then an egg farmer called.

Randy Ludacer likes tweaking classics. As a graphic and packaging designer, he’s designed a package for coat hangers that resembles a shirt, a puzzle cube-like box that holds souvenir candies, and a pasta sauce label whose barcode wraps around a fork like spaghetti. But he had no client or market in mind when he was fooling around on the web one day and thinking about egg cartons. Why not, he wondered, make a carton for a baker’s dozen of eggs? Not that it would have any practical benefits. After all, he had no egg farms as clients…

… Some 1,200 miles away, in Gretna, Nebraska, on the outskirts of Omaha, Chad Wegener was collecting eggs from the chickens he raises at Willow Valley Farms, a 40-acre spread by the Elkhorn River. One morning’s harvest with his 9-year old nephew yielded 13 eggs, a baker’s dozen. If only there were a carton for 13 eggs, thought Wegener, it would certainly set Willow Valley Farms apart from the crowd at Omaha’s farmer’s markets. Scouring the web for a baker’s dozen egg crate, he came across Ludacer’s blog. A few phone calls later, and the two were in business, aiming to produce and sell the odd-shaped cartons…

…But the pair discovered that industrial egg producers can’t use the innovative carton because their packing machines are set up to fill only two row egg boxes. Instead, they envision selling to small farms, which can use the carton to differentiate themselves at local markets…

Peter Green, Remaking a Classic Packaging Design,
Inc. Magazine, March 6, 2020
Paper & Packaging Board, How Life Unfolds^®

But, all tone-deaf crowing aside, things are actually pretty quiet here at BEACH right now. We’re self-isolating at home (like we always do) so Covid-19 wouldn’t have prevent us from doing our (mostly non-essential) work. But, with so many stores closed (and not accepting deliveries of new merchandise), most of our projects are currently on hold.

Closing of Farmers’ Markets

Ironically, although they provide wholesome (and essential) foods during this time, some regions (citing the pandemic) have closed their farmers markets. Mainly in congested areas.

While New York State specifically exempts farmers’ markets from the “mass gathering” prohibition, GrowNYC has selectively closed certain greenmarkets. And we see some similarly selective closings in California.

Seattle, on the other hand, has ordered all such markets closed until April 15. And officials in Staunton, VA have also closed their farmers’ market.

USDA waives Egg Grading Rule

And about eggs, in particular, this just in:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is taking immediate action to assist the American egg industry in redistributing the current inventory of safe, high quality table eggs from foodservice warehouses to retail distribution to support the surge in consumer demand for this staple food.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a rapid and dramatic shift in demand away from eggs produced and packaged for foodservice use towards those suitable for sale at supermarkets. This shift has created a temporary misalignment in the supply chain.

To support a robust supply of high quality table eggs, USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is immediately waiving the provision which prohibits official grading for eggs over 21 days in age or which have previously shipped for sale (7 CFR 70.3). This temporary deviation from the voluntary grading regulations will help meet consumer demand by allowing eggs recently shipped to foodservice to be returned to the origin farms for reprocessing, repackaging and grading for retail distribution.

USDA, March 26, 2020

March 24, 2020

Egg² Week (day 6): Egg-in-Cube, 2014

Day 6: Wenjing Huang, Fumihito Arai & Tomohiro Kawahara’s Egg-in-Cube

For the 6th day of Egg² Week we bring you another square egg. This time, however, the “Egg-in-Cube” is not a consumer product, but an embryonic research tool.

Scientists in Japan developed this cube-shaped “artificial eggshell.” Starting in 2014, they published a series of papers explaining their “novel biomedical platform.”

We initially intended to design a polyhedral-shaped eggshell to most closely mimic the shape of the normal eggshell (Fig. 1 (A)) using a thin membrane surface with oxygen permeability and transparency. However, it is difficult and costly to fabricate such a high-dimensional polyhedron structure. Therefore, we next considered a cube-shaped eggshell (Fig. 1(B)), which is easier to fabricate and whose posture (observation point) can be changed easily.

Egg-in-Cube: Design and Fabrication of a Novel Artificial Eggshell with Functionalized Surface, 2015

Interesting, that they had originally intended to use a higher-order polyhedron, like a dodecahedron. But financial constraints led them to the simpler (and, perhaps, more elegant?) cube-shape solution.

Clearly, the Egg-in-Cube artificial eggshell is for research, not resale. And yet its structure is superficially similar to some of the commercially proposed “square eggs” that we’ve looked at. Such as David Adams’ 1947 “Eggs Having Artificial Shells” and Lawrence Darrah’s 1956 “Shell-less Egg Carton.”

[Read more…]

March 19, 2020

Egg² Week (day 5): Christian Huc’s Apéroeuf

Huc’s 1988 patent drawing, Ov’Action’s 1989 Trademark, and L’aperoeuf photo, via: Archives nationales du monde du travail (Roubaix)

**Day 5: Christian Huc’s Apéroeuf, 1988**

The patent drawing in Christian Huc‘s 1989 patent, looks almost exactly like the drawing in David Adams’ 1953 patent. But where Adams drew his horizontal band to represent “sealing tape,” Huc drew his horizontal band to represent egg yolk.

Huc’s process is technically similar to the “long egg.” Long eggs, however were long & cylindrical with a tubular yolk core. (This was so that its slices would resemble those of a natural hard boiled egg.) Huc took a decisive step away that type of simulated naturalism.

Huc’s company (Ov’Action) launched the invention. First in France, with plans to also bring the product to Canada and to the U.S.

For the product’s brandname they trademarked a portmanteau of Apéritif and oeuf (egg): Apéroeuf. [Sometime it was also spelled with a diphthong/ligature as: Apérœuf]

Its publicity, however, centered on the squareness of the product.

Now… there’s a square egg. Cristian Huc, of Ov’ Action Inc., Lieven, France, is looking for North American partners to help market its bite-sized square egg — a fully-cooked, reconstituted hard egg cube, two-thirds of an inch square. The product is designed as an hors d’oeuvre snack and is made up of three layers, with white at the top and bottom and yellow in between. The square egg has a 21-day shelf life and sells in France for $1.50-$2.00 (U.S.) for a package of 24.

Poultry and Egg Market, 1989

A French firm markets a cube egg

The French food company Ov’action announced Tuesday the upcoming sale of “Apéroeuf,” a cube egg about two centimeters in size, formed of two layers of white enclosing a slice of yellow.

Carried out using an exclusive and complex microwave cooking process — developed after three years of study and $2 million in investments — the cube egg has been tested “successfully” in restaurants, according to Ov’action. The “Apéroeuf” range will also include varieties based on vegetables, seafood or meat.

Ov’Action wants to market 2,000 to 3,000 tons of “Apéroeuf” annually and export its products, or its know-how, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries and in Japan.

La Presse, Montréal, Thursday, November 25, 1989

But, in this case, since Huc’s square eggs were actually being sold—at least in France, I really wanted to find a product photo. This wasn’t easy, but due diligence sometimes pays off…

[Read more…]

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