business strategy

Franzia’s been mighty busy. Franzia’s recent labels proclaim “The World’s Most Popular Wine.” That’s a lot of bag-in-box and other packages. The label goes further to claim this wine is “also the World’s most cost and carbon efficient wine.” There is a nice chart with pretty icons to support this claim at least in part. The brand owner has explained:

The wine industry is perhaps the most vulnerable of any food and beverage producer to “carbon criticism,” due to its historical reliance on heavyweight glass packaging and its failure to migrate to more environmentally sensitive packages. … As the world’s leader in Bag-In-Box (BIB) packaging, [The Wine Group, Inc.] is in a unique position to assist retailers with innovative 3L and 5L BIB packages that eliminate the freshness trade-off associated with most other forms of alternative packaging. … The Wine Group is taking aggressive measures to reduce overall energy consumption by our wineries, and leading the industry to implement local bottling of imported and exported wine. This reduces carbon emissions through unnecessary transportation of heavy glass,” said [David Kent, CEO].

This packaging consortium has a good FAQ about the environmental issues but still it would be good to see more sources and evidence.

Sin City seems to be alive and well in the hearts and minds of drinkers and marketers everywhere. Sin City Whiskey (above) is imported by Side Pocket Foods of Oregon. Viva Las Vegas is a California white wine bottled by Cartlidge & Browne Winery of American Canyon, California.

We thought this was a good example of unusual label design, and so did Mike Carter. Mike probably knows quite a bit more about art and design, compared to us, but then again we’ve looked at as many wine labels as anyone. Who is Mike Carter?

For more than a decade Mike has been helping wine companies reduce their print & packaging costs and improve supply chain efficiency. Mike is also a published author with articles published on wine.co.za, Practical Winery & Vineyard and WineLand magazines. Mike earned his MBA at Bond University and lives in Somerset West, South Africa.

His blog covers wine label design, very well. We also wanted to mention the above label because The Grateful Palate seems to have a propensity to find uncommon labels. We have showed their Punk and Evil wine labels in the past.