The relaunch consists of three existing flavours - chicken, beef and vegetable - plus two new varieties created to reflect the growing trend towards different tastes, beef with red wine and onion with sage and thyme.
The company felt that the revamped brand required a corresponding redesign in packaging. Campbells was keen to highlight the changes and emphasise the brand's positioning as a contemporary product. Campbells decided to use PET, which is becoming widely used in the food industry for its modern aesthetics and its practical benefits of being lightweight and shatterproof.
The PET jar, available in 170g and 300g sizes, features an attractive curved shape designed to make the product stand out on-shelf and be easy for consumers to handle. The jars are also decorated with full body shrink sleeves from Fuji, with different colours for each flavour. These have been applied on-line at RPC Blackburn. Colour-matching caps have been supplied by Mass Mould.
"The PET jar from RPC suggests both a premium product and everyday practicality," said Roisin McCart, innovations marketing manager at Campbells. "As such, we are sure that it is the right container to help place Oxo Gravy Granules at the forefront of consumer affection."
The Oxo project comes straight after the recent completion of a new factory at RPC Tedeco-GizehDeventer, the Netherlands. This has been built to improve thesite's efficiency. The state-of-the-art facility consolidates the siteinto one building, replacing the original twoproduction locations one kilometre apart. Allproduction and printing lines are now centrallylocated to maximise efficiency.
Henk Kloeze, general manager of RPCTededo-Gizeh, said: "The new factory has been designed and built to maximise the efficiency of our operation. This will provide benefits to customers, both existing and new."
The RPC Group is one of Europe's leading manufacturers of rigid plastic packaging, unique in offering products made by all three main conversion processes, blowmoulding, injection moulding and thermoforming. The group has over 30 autonomous sites in 10 countries, employing in excess of 5,600 people. RPC services a comprehensive range of customers, from companies such as Unilever and Nestlé, to small national businesses. The group claims to have a particularly strong position in the vending and drinking cup market, the margarine industry, and in multilayer sheet and packs for oxygen sensitive food products.
The company has also managed to maintain its 10-year growth record in the first half in spite of weak demand in the eurozone. Sales were lifted by £17 million to £201 million in the six months to September 2003, helped by strong demand in the UK for margarine tubs. Pre-tax profit rose from £10 million to £11.4 million, helped by a net gain on property transactions of £152,000 and a fall in interest payable.