Bad Packaging Design

In daily lives, people can meet varied modes of packaging. Individuals may love product due to their good packaging design and may deny something because of its bad packaging. The post will talk about bad packaging design to avoid some problems during the period of designing mooncakes packaging.

'Individually packaged bananas'

For banana, it is not necessary to seal the package separately with plastic, because it is not that fragile and has its own skin.
The packaging is wasted and environmentally unfriendly behaviour.

'Unnecessarily large packaging'

There are such big packaging and I feel curious if small tiny flash drives are wrapped in the big packaging. It is obvious that the answer is no.

In the process of designing packaging, the features of the product itself are an important point, according to two examples.

Later, I narrowed my search down to the packaging of mooncakes.

Over-packaging of mooncakes

After searching for some pictures from mooncakes on Google, I found there are too many beautiful and delicate mooncake boxes, even some of them use some complex packaging layers. Due to the homogeneity of tastes, companies and individuals who choose a mooncake as a gift tend to choose a mooncake with more elaborate packaging. As a result, mooncake sellers are increasingly prone to over-packaging in order to fetch a high price, for example, a mooncakes box with the dressing table style in the picture below. 

 The mooncakes are wrapped in at least three layers. This is a very exquisite box that is suitable as a gift, but  I do not think that it is a good experience for people who want to eat mooncakes to open so many packaging layers before eating them. 
Also, the red outer packing box is not suitable for the blue, pink, grass-green and yellow-green small box.





Most of the criticism about the mooncakes packaging is about the environment, for example, 'this is due to the glossy varnish or waterproof wax covering most boxes, and as such, the boxes are eventually sent to the incineration plant'(Zheng and Tan, n.d)

It may be a good choice that the layer of packaging that comes into direct contact with the mooncake is made of biodegradable paper or is cancelled, instead of plastic.


References:

Horowitz. A. (2011) 12 Incredibly Stupid Ways Companies Package Products. [www] business insider. Available from: https://www.businessinsider.com/15-incredibly-stupid-ways-to-package-a-product-2011-3?r=US&IR=T#san-disk-puts-three-tiny-flash-drives-in-unnecessarily-large-packaging-9 [Accessed 09/04/20].

Zheng. Z. and Tan.A. (n.d.) Leave the mooncakes alone, all fancy packagings can't be recycled easily.  [www] mothership. sg.
Available from: https://mothership.sg/2019/08/mooncake-packaging-cannot-be-recycled/ [Accessed 09/04/20].