Australian honey producer Capilano has marked its 60th year of operation with a switch to a new packaging format – using squeeze tubes for a new range of Honey Fusion products.
The company earlier this year launched a range of flavoured honey, sporting such flavour combinations as honey and vanilla, honey and lemon, honey and ginger and honey and maple syrup.
The range is packaged in extruded plastic squeeze tubes, with the print orientated to the flip top cap on the tube.
Capilano's operations manager, Lisa Gowans, says the move to the new pack format was prompted by a desire to offer more a convenient option to consumers.
“Capilano decided to use tubes for the new Honey Fusions range as it offered a new packaging format for honey products in Australia,” she says.
“Our research demonstrated that it was easier to use honey packaged in tubes whilst cooking and the tube is easily transportable, perfect for camping trips and picnics.”
To help it make the move to tubes, Capilano approached Sydney-based Impact International, a local manufacturer of squeeze tube and collapsible tube packaging in Australia since 1958.
While it has long been a supplier of packaging for pharmaceutical and personal care tube products such as toothpaste, Impact also says it is the only tube manufacturer in Asia to be HACCP accredited for food packaging.
Aleks Lajovic, Impact's sales and marketing manager, says Capilano's decision to adopt the tube format was significant in that Australian food companies are more hesitant than their counterparts in Europe, the Americas and Asia to use tubes for food packaging.
“Why is there so little food in tubes back home in Australia?” Lajovic says. “Whilst the Australian way of life and dietary habits do differ from the Americans, Europeans and Japanese, there are still plenty of products that could benefit from being in tubes.
“Take tomato and barbecue sauce, for example. Now who has been at a BBQ, placed that slightly burnt sausage in their bread roll, turned the sauce bottle upside down and then squeezed and squeezed until the sauce comes out?
“And when it does come out, it gets released in a slow trickle or in a raging torrent of sauce, which occasionally ends up on your shirt or pants.
“You don’t have this problem with a tube because the tube stands on its cap and gravity is always pulling the contents of the tube down to the dispensing orifice. When it comes to packaging sauces and pastes, why do we continue to fight the well proven laws of gravity?”
Lajovic says tubes also offer significant marketing and supply chain benefits for brand owners and retailers.
“Tubes offer Australian food companies a proven form of packaging that delivers excellent oxygen and moisture barrier properties, bright and vibrant print and decoration options, accompanied by excellent consumer acceptance,” he says.
“Tubes are easy to stock on retail shelves, filling equipment is readily available and minimum order quantities start at 5000 tubes.”
