Tetra Top 200ml Mini Saroma won the Food Packaging Category Award at the Japan Packaging Contest 2012 sponsored by the Japan Packaging Institute. The package is the result of a collaborative effort between the customer Meiji, Tetra Pak Japan, Front End Innovation & Design and Carton Bottle R&D.
Drinking Yoghurt Package for Meiji
Designing the co-development process
Tetra Top Saroma is a 200 ml yoghurt drink carton package recently launched to market in Japan. Unlike most carton packages, the top is made of plastic in order to deliver a better drinking experience. After usage, the plastic top can be easily torn away from the carton sleeve, preventing unnecessary plastic from entering the carton recycling stream.
The plastic lid is moulded to the carton sleeved at extremely high speed (it takes 1.5 seconds per top) to deliver a design solution that allows users to choose from 2 different modes of consumption - directly through a straw, or directly from the spout. When drinking through a straw, the lid is opened partially, allowing just enough room for a straw to pass.
This prevents unnecessary spillage during consumption - a particular benefit around kids. The lid can then be torn fully away to reveal a large diameter ‘drink from’ spout with a soft edge for a comfortable lip contact. The lid remains connected to the package and can be held away from the face during consumption.
A key mandate for the Front End Innovation & Design group at Tetra Pak was to drive Co-development activities with key strategic customers such as Meiji in Japan. Should the potential sales volumes with one particular customer be large enough, Tetra Pak for the first time were willing to offer design exclusivity on a unique package concept for a period of time.
Chris & the design team liaised closely with Tetra Pak’s Japanese R&D team and Meiji to co-develop the new package. To give Meiji a sense of ownership of the design solution, the team broke the package down until a menu of easily manageable chunks. This allowed Meiji to clearly recognise the boundaries of what was possible, play with different combinations and more easily arrive at their preferred solution.
All elements presented were pre-aligned to the technical capabilities of the package platform, enabling us to give Meiji a sense of choice, but within the realms of what we felt comfortable we could deliver. Some attributes required more time and effort to deliver than others, so by mapping the attributes onto a time vs. complexity matrix, Meji were able to make their own trade offs between time to market and impact.
This principle defined the framework for Tetra Pak’s customer co- development process and was subsequently repeated on numerous other co-development projects.
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