Heinz food labelling in the 1990s
In the 1990s with new legislation to grapple with, the food maker H.J. Heinz collaborated with schools in order to make a ‘Project Pack’. With the guidance of teachers from schools in the Croydon area, a series of laminated work sheets were produced which introduced ideas relating to food labelling – its history, the law, E numbers and so on.
These sheets were intended ‘to support pupil-based learning for cross-curricular work’. Being the 1990s, ‘pupils are encouraged to use computers’, with one sheet suggesting, ‘use a computer programme to write a nutrition information label’.
Best of all (for us), the pack included examples of Heinz tin labelling, for example, soups and baked beans. With these in mind, teachers’ notes suggest examples of the sorts of projects students could be given – designing a label for a new food, catering for an event, that sort of thing. Bar codes were starting to appear on grocery labels at the time, and these were explained. I vaguely recall the fuss that consumers made at the time as bar codes appeared for the first time on, say, magazine covers. Nowadays we don’t even notice them.
To contact Heinz, there was simply a postal address – writing a letter and putting it in the post was still normal. There were no email addresses or websites or social media. My calculation is that these notes are from about 1992, maybe a bit later. Certainly not before 1991, as the notes mention legislation of that date, but with not even a phone number, and using language like ‘computer programme’, surely not much later. The picture of the happy family (running to buy Heinz products, maybe?) looks even earlier, but what do I know.
These have come from a supporter in Wolverhampton, whose uncle was a sales rep at the time. That same uncle represented Epicure, on which we did a blog a while back: https://www.richardrobertsarchive.org.uk/stockport-advertising-archive-blog/epicure
