This is the Modern World
You wouldn’t think something as ordinary as this Lard wrapper would have any deep meaning whatsoever but one look at that and I’m in our kitchen in the 1970s and mum is cooking Sunday dinner, putting big lumps of it in the roasting tin to cook the meat and potatoes in. The product itself is nostalgic enough, from back when people happily cooked things in pig fat (and apparently are starting to again) but it’s the Sainsbury’s wrapper that adds the extra Proustian layer to it.
The image comes from a book called Own Label which is all about the (at the time) radically modern packaging design of Sainsbury’s supermarkets own products from 1962-1977. Not, on the face of it, the most riveting subject for non-designers (or a lot of designers either for that matter) but if you are a certain age, seeing this stuff all collected together stirs not just admiration for the design but a whole flood of memories of going to the supermarket when you were a kid — and with their shelves stocked with this bold packaging Sainsbury’s left a more vivid impression than Tesco’s or The Co-Op.
Sainsbury’s were quite the forward-thinking company in the 60s, not only with these designs but they pioneered the whole concept of the own-brand product and their new, convenient “super” markets were where modern mums shopped. These days this graphic and minimalist style might seem more appropriate for pharmaceuticals than food but back then “modernism” hadn’t yet become a dirty word synonymous with ugly tower blocks and desolate shopping precincts and still meant optimistic progress toward a bright, shiny future when the world would be all efficient clean lines designed by clever men in suits. In this brave new world food would be convenient and modern too which even extended to feeding babies, like a lot of people my age I was bottle fed because artificial milk was seen as being better and more “advanced” than the natural kind.
Though they have a certain amount of retro cool I doubt if these would sell today, “progress” failed and the future went out of style sometime in the early 1970s, at least when it comes to things you eat. Not surprisingly people now prefer their food to look like it was grown by farmers and not men in white coats.
Speaking of mod-ernism…
Download: Shopping – The Jam (mp3)
Sainsbury’s hadn’t reached our bit of Devon when I was a kid, but my sister, who had moved to up and coming Peterborough (ahem) and was a nascent SDP-voting type, bought everything there, own-label. I remember that Cola though. Must have slurped some when we went to visit!
A few fizzy drinks were available a bit back in their classic (seventies?) labelling, I bought a bottle of Tizer for posterity but succumbed to its tasty flavour and then the missus recycled the bottle.
I’ve already put this book on my Christmas list…
This book looks very good, thanks for the tip-off. I remember Sainsbury’s stuff standing out amongst other supermarkets’, not that we had a lot of it in our house, because it was I suppose on the dear side and still ‘own brand’, after all…
Along with the big brown paper carrier bags (‘It’s clean, it’s fresh..’) a lot of these designs would probably stand up today, appealing to those buyers who like things a little less twee and folksy. Perhaps the kind of people who follow Heston’s scientific approach to cooking; he could take over from Jamie as Sainsbury’s cookery mascot.
I’m presuming that the Cola design took it’s inspiration from the design for Barr’s [American] Strike Cola, and not the other way around, but I do not know that for sure.
Sainsbury’s was a word I heard whispered on the wind as it blew its way to my corner of The North. I’d heard of it but it seemed impossibly exotic, you might as well have been talking about shopping in Tahiti. Ditto The Clash banging on about Capital Radio; we would have LOVED Capital Radio Oop North! I had to get all angsty and punk listening to Lamb Bank on Radio Cumbria!
When I went to college I discovered Sainsbury’s Moroccan Red, at 49p a bottle. Different world from the Hirondelles and Blue Nuns :).
Moroccan Red? Sounds more like something you’d roll up in a Rizla and smoke.
That instant milk label looks ike the cover of a Pelican paperback – something by Hans Eysenck, perhaps – circa 1972.
Thanks much for this music, I had forgotton how pretty it is!