Column Pieter Vos: Know your audience

What are the key lessons for safely packaging food? You know what, I thought: I'll ask ChatGPT. Curious to see what comes out.

Unsurprisingly, the chatbot cheerily knocks down a few obvious truths. "Safely packaging food is essential to maintain the quality and safety of food," I read. "By choosing the right packaging materials, ensuring the packaging is well sealed, storing food properly, labeling, and regularly checking for spoilage, we can reduce the risk of food-related illnesses and ensure that our food remains fresh and safe."

My second question to this all-knowing entity is to write a lesson on how to package food 'as beautifully as possible'. In summary, ChatGPT teaches that food packaging 'can be not only functional but also an art form in itself. Creating attractive and effective food packaging requires attention to detail, creativity, and knowledge of design principles.' Approached from a 'beautiful and appealing' angle, this bot then places 'Know your audience' at the top. In doing so, it relegates 'choose the right materials' from the answer to my first question to a second place.

This gets me thinking. Even, or perhaps especially, in the current climate where there is increasing attention to recycle, reduce, and reuse, the starting point of the design process for your product's packaging still lies with marketing. Knowing your audience, their desires and needs ultimately dictate the requirements you pass on to the technical side and the quality (all this, of course, within the boundaries of ever-tightening legislation and regulations).

Conclusion from this human: think from your customer's perspective, not from your factory's.

Pieter Vos
Director Nutrilab