Who Packs the Nicest Bread Rolls?

© Messe Düsseldorf/Tillmann

© René Tillmann / Messe Düsseldorf

© René Tillmann / Messe Düsseldorf

© BÄKO

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The bread rolls are sold in far more than just rustling bags for holding mouth-watering bread rolls and keeping the bread fresh and crisp. Boasting high-quality printing and good design they also look attractive and serve as ideal advertising media. Smell, touch, sight and anticipated taste: this packaging appeals to all the senses.

They trigger that pleasant anticipation of breakfast and whet your appetite for a snack or break in between meals. The bags rustle so appealingly, inside the mouth-watering bread rolls stay crisp and fresh, they match the size of the rolls exactly and easily stand their weight. Printed in colour they convey a good mood and can also serve as excellent advertising media. Bread roll bags are examples of packaging in high production numbers that often pass through many hands before finally – often after many days – ending up in the rubbish bin: their frequency of contact at five to eight points of contact is considerably higher than that of print media. As a rule, once purchased the bag is taken into private households or offices where valuable multiple contacts arise. Bread roll bags can therefore take advertising to places people would not anticipate and achieve high degrees of effectiveness.

Very few consumers realise they have state-of-the-art technology to thank for that bread roll bags function so well in everyday life. Behind every bread roll bag is the know-how of paper manufacturers, the printing ink industry, press manufacturers through to logistics and design services. The right choice of paper quality plays an ever more important role and quality aspects like brightness, surface smoothness, resistance to tearing, opaqueness etc. are enormously important. Sustainability, environmental awareness and packaged food safety are obviously also of key importance.

For the Environment

The first “carbon-neutral” bread roll bags are now on the market. Meyer/Stemmle, for instance, gives bakeries, catering establishments and takeaways the chance to document to their customers that their operations have opted to commit to protecting the environment and act with a sense of responsibility. Operations receive a certificate and can label their packaging “carbon neutral”. By company accounts, Meyer/Stemmle is the first packaging partner for the bakery sector that offers carbon-neutral packaging. The company produces a total of over two billion folded paper sachets annually.

As a Calling Card

The Christmas period, that time of beautiful packaging, offers an especially good opportunity for selling stollen or biscuits in shiny film wrappers or bags to customers – thereby giving them an excellent “calling card” to take right home with them. Bakery product packaging is also ideal for attaching order slips to with or without perforations, flyers or coupons for competitions etc.



The Competition

For the first time this year a bread roll bag design competition was held aimed at increasing the value of this medium even further. In summer BÄKO, Germany’s leading specialist wholesaler for bakers and confectioners, invited entries for the Germany-wide competition open to students in art academies, vocational schools, polytechnics and design, visual communication and arts academies. The competition aimed to find design concepts for a new BÄKO motif usable throughout the year on folded paper sachets, bread roll bags, paper on reels, carrier bags, coffee-to-go cups and paper napkins. The first prize was a prize money of Euro 2,000 plus the chance to have the idea become the central motif on millions of items of bakery packaging.

The four prize-winners were selected on 4 October at the recent iba 2009, World Market for Baking, held in Düsseldorf. First prize went to Curie Kure, communication design student from Hamburg. Her design emphasises classic grain motifs and distinctive products that indicate the ingredients and origins of the bakery trade.

“Packaging is also gaining ever increasing importance amongst bakers and confectioners. We initiated this competition because we wish to find new, non-sector-specific and unexploited ideas and would like to present familiar packaging materials in a new context,” said Stefan Strehle, Managing Director at BÄKO-Zentrale Nord eG, explaining the aim of the competition.