By Ben Dodson
When you move into a new house there are always a few surprises – some good and some not so great. For the latter, it’s often in the form of dirty cupboards, tools in the shed, damp patches on the walls or those handy curtains you didn’t expect to be left.
When I moved to a London commuter town in Surrey in 2013, my experience was no different. We had the usual damp issues, but it was what we found under the floorboards that inspired me to write this.
Not unlike many houses in Surrey during WW2, ours was requisitioned by the Canadian Army. During that time, it was used for returning soldiers from France requiring convalescence. For reasons unknown to us, one of those Canadian soldiers buried a ‘parcel from home’ under the floorboards of one of our bedrooms. This package contained packaging from 1942 – empty tins of food, cigarettes, tea-bags, stock cubes etc. – all housed in a fabric envelope with a label featuring the soldier’s name and rank and his mother’s home address.
My wife and I were delighted to have unearthed some history of the house and spent several weeks trying to find the soldier. We would have loved to have asked him about his story and why he had hidden the parcel. Unfortunately, we learnt that he had passed away some years previously, so we will never really know.
We were of course disappointed. But as intriguing to me as the story itself was the 70-year-old print and packaging and what we could learn from them. It was fascinating to see how brands and printers had adapted their offering to support the war rationing of WW2.
One of the items we found was a tin of Heinz Baked Beans. Very well preserved, the label was pretty much intact, but it was also a third of the size of the same label today and the labels on other pieces of Canadian packaging we found in the same parcel. So I began to ask myself, was this reduction in label size as a result of UK war rationing? Baked beans manufactured in the UK and shipped to Canada. The answer was, yes. I then set about trying to understand what this meant to brands and how they communicated with consumers during this period.
Despite the change in label size, the 1942 label features the same – if not very similar – Heinz logo, the same corporate blue and a reference to recipe ‘57’. It looks distinctly like a Heinz Baked Bean product – a credit to the brand guardianship within Heinz that it’s still instantly recognisable. However, there are quite a few differences between this and its 2017 counterpart. For instance, there is no photo/illustration of the product – hot baked beans – it uses only three colours and the consumer information is also very different.
As you would expect, the label doesn’t include a barcode, a recycling symbol or the calorie and nutritional information we see on modern cans. Nonetheless, Heinz doesn’t neglect the opportunity to promote the product either. For instance, the war period label still promotes the freshness of its ingredients and provides consumer confidence, stating that it’s ‘pure food and is easily digested’ and that ‘it is made to comply with Government standards’. During a period of food rationing and with limited access to fresh ingredients, those were no doubt comforting words to any parent.
Of course, not much of the information we include today was required in 1942. So, that probably made it easier to reduce the label size to meet rationing restrictions. Indeed, the substrate weight is also very light. The 1940’s printer would no doubt have been under huge pressure to make their consumables go as far as possible, and to minimise waste. For vastly different reasons of course, but not so different from many print houses today looking to retain their competitiveness and increase their profitability.
If brands today faced the same challenge, it would be interesting to see what consumer information they prioritised. No doubt the modern printer would also explore the different analogue and digital label printing options available to meet this challenge – And with the introduction of inkjet technology allowing direct to shape/can printing, perhaps also eradicating traditional labels in the future too.
But it isn’t just the label size that’s changed. On my 1942 Heinz Baked Bean tin, customers were encouraged to place the whole can in a pan of hot water for 20 minutes before opening and consuming. Very different from cooking the beans directly in a pan as is usual today (not including the microwave). It isn’t obvious whether this is how we typically cooked baked beans in the 1940s, or if this information was adapted for cooking during the war. No doubt, servicemen ate food direct from tins to save time and any necessary washing-up, so perhaps a war suggestion.
Either way, it’s interesting to consider whether Heinz produced different labels for different customer types – i.e. service personnel, UK retail consumers and then export products such as our Canadian beans, and if the war increased the use of label/packaging versioning.
On this tin and on other items found under our floorboards, there is also a more informal tone used to describe the products. A Clarke’s tin of tomato juice also found in the house, tells the consumer that it’s ‘fancy quality’. While I’m not sure if that means that it’s a superior product at a budget price or that it’s a premium brand aimed more of the working class, it’s a fascinating insight into 1940s’ branding.
As I read local stories of Surrey children being given bubble-gum and Coca-Cola by Canadian servicemen for the first time, it does make me wonder how influential the second World War was in driving international awareness and demand for foreign brands.
And more widely, the legacy of these foreign brands and war-imposed packaging designs on business and the modern printing and packaging market we know today.
