FoodBev spoke to Eleanor Brooker, marketing manager of Garcon Wines after receiving the World Beverage Innovation Award for Best Packaging Design and Label with its product – Flat Sustainable Wine Bottle.
We first entered the World Beverage Innovation Awards back in 2017 with a concept to offer single bottles of wine, delivered seamlessly and conveniently through the letterbox for the ‘Amazon generation’ of younger wine consumers wanting to receive product in smaller volumes and more frequently. Letterbox Wine®, as it’s since come to be known, won Best New Beverage Concept at Drinktec in Munich, Germany – our first award win. This award was also won with a concept bottle, which explained flat wine bottles well but lacked the performance of the product we have today.
Fast forward two years and we’ve won an award for a highly advanced eco, flat wine bottle and fully commercialised product that’s advancing the wine industry far beyond just seamless letterbox delivery in the UK, with multinational opportunities in retail, events & hospitality, supermarkets, airlines and more. This win means a lot to us as it brings us full circle and highlights just how far we’ve come. Furthermore, being recognised as best in class for packaging design, which is fundamental to what we do, is very important for our brand. The judges summarised what we do in a way that it would be hard for us to improve on, so I will repeat their remarks: “A completely disruptive packaging design within a very traditional space, yet not far enough to rub consumers the wrong way or be completely ignored.” We’re very grateful to the judges for bestowing us this accolade. The hard-to-beat reputational foundation we are building, by winning an increasing number of well-respected awards, is providing us the strongest base from which to continue to grow our commercial success.
Garçon Wines are the inventors of eco-friendly, flat wine bottles that are made of 100% pre-existing, recycled PET, not single-use plastic, and are easily, fully, and widely recyclable after use. Our multi award-winning bottles are 40% spatially smaller and 87% lighter than round, glass bottles of the same volume, which makes them remarkably more cost-effective, eco-friendly, and consumer pleasing for delivery, retailing, and the supply chain. Importantly, we wanted the design of the bottles to be beautiful enough for consumers to place on the dining table. Through conforming to the traditional Bordeaux shape with the strong, curved shoulders, we retain the emotional connection consumers have from drinking wine from the bottle shapes they know and like. Additionally, our design also achieves maximum functional and sustainable benefits through innovating in shape and material.
Earlier this year, we won Best Sustainable Packaging and Best Packaging Design in the World Food Innovation Awards 2019. We wanted to enter the World Beverage Innovation Awards in the hope that we’d replicate our success specifically for the beverage industry. As a start-up that’s bringing about the most significant advancement to wine packaging in the last two centuries, being recognised for our innovation through entering awards is fundamentally important for our visibility and credibility. While we’re starting off with revolutionising the wine industry, our plans to create sustainable packaging solutions extend beyond wine to other beverages too. Building this reputational traction for the wider industry, through entering wider global beverage industry awards, offers us the most solid foundation from where to grow our success.
It, of course, feels amazing to win, but additionally it’s incredibly motivational to receive such positive feedback from the judges. The wine industry is very traditional with a rich heritage and the traditional wine bottles have remained relatively unchanged for the past two centuries. This award is testament to our commitment to ensure that our packaging design is an advancement to the bottle, not an alternative, to respect this tradition. In doing so, we believe this design gives us the greatest chance to make these bottles the dominant primary packaging for wine which is important to make the industry more sustainable. However, like the judges acknowledge, for widespread adoption to happen, the packaging design has to appeal both to consumers and important stakeholders in the industry. It feels great to have received these positive words of endorsement that we have achieved the above with our packaging. Many thanks once again to FoodBev Media and the judges.
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