Perfect paper

The fortunes of paper and carton packaging in European confectionery is dominated by chocolate.  For paper, it is chocolate tablets that take the majority share with 55 per cent of new launches using paper in both 2011 and in 2012 to date.  For cartons, boxed chocolate pieces lead the way but are less dominant accounting for just 32 per cent of launches in carton so far in 2012, again chocolate tablets show themselves, accounting for 26 per cent of new launches.

Premium confectionery

Both these categories can be considered to be at the premium end of confectionery, where margins enable the packaging to be leveraged to communicate product positioning and quality.  As such chocolate tablets have managed, in the main, to avoid the move into flexible plastic flow wrap that most chocolate countlines have long taken in the search for a low cost and fast fill solution.  By retaining a traditional packaging combination of paper or board with foil, chocolate tablets communicate a heritage positioning, highlighting to consumers that quality ingredients and processing are core aspects of the product.  That’s not to say that flavour is not important and indeed with consumers looking to chocolate confectionery for an affordable treat, many of the leading brands have expanded their flavour range and often introduce limited edition flavours.  With this spread, packaging has had to work harder and we are increasingly seeing the use of bright colours in chocolate tablet to communicate flavour variants, a definite move away from classic muted colours.

In boxed chocolate pieces the traditional rectangle format with a thermoformed tray are still a core pack type and are likely to remain that way for premium end gifting chocolates.  However share packs and formats that enable sharing are growing in importance across snacks and are now making an impact in confectionery.  As such we’re increasingly seeing more upright cartons with loose, often individually wrapped, chocolates that are easy to pass round.  Removing the thermoformed tray is also likely to go down well with consumers who increasingly dislike anything that may be seen as ‘too much’ packaging.

Gum

Another category worthy of note for the use of cartons is gum.  The relatively recent move to wallet style cartons for stick gum have brought new life to this category.  The larger surface area makes for great on shelf impact and combines well with either high impact highly coloured designs such as Trident Senses, as well as the more sophisticated simpler black styling’s of Wrigley 5.  In the past few months this pack format has been redesigned into a smaller, more affordable, 6-stick pack in the US showing that board cartons have a place even at the smaller extremes of pack sizes.  It is likely that a similar size pack for Wrigley’s gum brands will soon be brought to Europe.

However with confectionery targeting the fickle young, new innovations are needed all the time to give brands the edge and keep them fresh.  In order to do just that Stride have launched ID gum in the US with a novel magnetic closure, adding a whole new functionality to this board carton stick gum pack format.  So whilst paper and carton packaging are perhaps most widely leveraged for the traditional associations that consumers have with these packaging materials, it is innovations in design and functionality which keep them relevant to today’s confectionery consumer.

By Dr Benjamin Punchard, senior global packaging analyst at Mintel