Clever labelling gives European milk products the edge

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Recent developments in dairy product packaging and printing show how the right labelling can give a real boost. But sometimes it can go wrong

by NORMAN DUNN

There's no doubt that milk and its products are firmly established as best-sellers in the European food and drinks sector, mainly because the industry is by far the most innovative in developing new ideas and products. Even in countries famed for their high consumption of beer, such as Britain, Belgium and Germany, milk and yoghurt drinks have consistently beaten beer in the last years in terms of annual turnover.

But the unsung heroes of this success story are surely the label and packaging designers. Even just 30 years ago, a plain white carton with the dairy name and telephone number printed in black was the norm. If the printing was blue, that was seen as daringly innovative. And a picture of a cow or maybe a slogan like You can whip our cream but you can't beat our prices was considered mega-marketing.

In Europe, one of the real pioneers in more sophistication in dairy product packaging was the Dutch dairy co-operative Campina Melkunie (now part of FrieslandCampina). In the 1990s, it covered its drinking milk cartons with black and white patterns ‡ la Holstein and started a revolution. Now, some cartons are almost works of art, especially those from Swiss and Austrian dairies.

Then came the new catchy names. MUH was a natural for the three-million-litres-per-day processing co-operative Milch-Union Hocheifel, a farmer-owned dairy in Germany's Eifel mountain range. MUH milk is now known internationally. Switzerland has picked up on the same theme with one of the country's biggest dairy exporters selling its cheeses and other products in Asia and the Arabian peninsula under the label Swissmooh.

Talking of the Eifel Mountains and Switzerland, such highland regions in Europe, with their image in the public mind of small family farms and hand-produced butter and cheese, feature on a lot of labels – sometimes with questionable veracity. For instance, a leading dairy in the hills of the Black Forest was this year selling Black Forest Sour Cream Butter very successfully for a number of months until a local newspaper published the real story. The butter was actually made 100 miles away in the so-called Allg‰u region.

Now, this is also an intensive dairying land noted for its quality production, but the fact was that the label had been wrong. The Black Forest dairy claimed the labelling referred only to the way the butter was made – with sour cream – while conceding that it was in error. The labelling was changed within a week. 

But the term Black Forest Butter had proved itself a real marketing winner and, less than three months later, the dairy is currently investing the equivalent of C$2.8 million in a new butter plant – directly in the Black Forest.

Interestingly, the area making the false Black Forest butter is trying its own hand at cross-regional labelling. There, one of the largest dairies in the Allg‰u (southern Germany) has been enjoying considerable success in selling Emmental and raclette cheeses over the border in France. This year, German butter is to be added to the product range, but it has been labelled Beurre Allg‰u. Will it sell well in the notoriously patriotic French dairy market? The jury is still out in this case, but using French on the label will no doubt help.

Sometimes, however, using a foreign language can present a real problem when marketing food and drink in Europe, a continent which likes to be seen as racially integrated, but one where there are hidden reefs of razor-sharp national pride below the seemingly calm multi-culti surface.

Take the example this year of the Lower Austria Dairy N÷M, one of the Alpine republic's top three milk processors, which thought it a clever marketing move to label at least some of its milk cartons in Turkish. After all, there are several hundred thousand Turks settled in Austria's larger cities and the new labelling was seen not only as astute marketing but also integration-friendly.

But, within a few days, German-speaking customers were threatening to boycott all of the dairy's products if it persisted in marketing milk in cartons with foreign writing on them. In fact, N÷M had taken the trouble to use the Turkish language on two sides of the cartons only, and stay with German for the other two. The dairy also pointed out that the carton labelling causing the furore was only meant to be delivered to supermarkets in Turkish areas of the main cities. All this was to no avail and it looks like this well-meaning adoption of another language will be stopped by public pressure.

The Austrian dairy hasn't lost out completely, though. First, it has enjoyed an unparalleled exposure in the international press which, as a major exporter, can do it no harm at all. Second, the integration impulse has been praised by (just about) every politician in the land.

Still, Austria is a democracy, as its minister of agriculture Nickolaus Berlakovich dryly remarked at the time. If some consumers think the milk tastes better with only German writing on the carton, then they are free to buy it! BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.