design box
Mozzarellas and Design The new frontier of industrial design is “food industrial design” where mozzarellas become functional and aesthetic objects.
84
2/06
Federico Casotto My friends start laughing when I say I am working on mozzarellas. They envisage a surreal scene: a forty year old at the computer staring at trendy, aerodynamic, metallic images, three-dimensional models of burrate and trecce; sections of scamorza… I can’t entirely blame them for laughing, but the comic effect is the result of a widespread misunderstanding. The only part that is real is the forty year old sitting at the computer. The word “design” conjures up images of chairs, kitchens, cars, clothes and (expensive) objects in general, through which the designer creates a personal and abstract concept of “beauty” or establishes a larger set of values which can be traced to his label, or to a school or style. This is the world we refer to when we talk about “Design” tout court, “design objects” and “Italian design”. A world from which mozzarella is definitely excluded. It is clear that the design of a food product calls for a completely different approach. It is not a question of “designing “ the mozzarella, of giving the cheese or packaging an abstractly “beautiful” and original form, let alone a matter of expressing the designer’s identity through it. The visual characteristics of the product are just one of the aspects of the design and are not always those which are most important. The Food Industrial Designer acts directly or indirectly on a very complex system of factors which determine the product’s identity and credibility: shape, flavour, consistency, dosage, graphic and structural packaging, consumption occasions and modalities, product (the mozzarella) image and brand image, sales channels, price. Our objective, when we address food innovation, is to harmonise all these factors in a new, persuasive and interesting concept. As you can see there isn’t a great deal to laugh about. For us the creative act is less free than it is for a chair designer (don’t mistake this for a value
judgement: creative freedom is anything but easy to cope with) and the need to reconcile many variables limits our field of action, above all if it is combined with the constraints dictated by customer technology. On the other hand this is where our talent lies: acting within narrow constraints, spotting potential areas for innovation even in apparently saturated sectors. Mozzarella, for example. A typical “kamikaze project” as we like to define tough briefs, those which don’t leave any easy way out for the designer. Mozzarella is a product with a very specific image and extremely close ties with tradition, above all in Italy. It seemed impossible to generate innovation in such a conservative market. Yet, after a careful analysis of consumption modalities and occasions and the possibilities of technological evolution, a large number of opportunities emerged which translated into approximately twenty new design concepts. I would like to give two examples, although I am forced to keep things vague for obvious reasons of confidentiality. Firstly, industrial mozzarellas are always to be found in canteens and self-service restaurants. They are favoured over other mozzarellas for reasons both of hygiene and preservation. They are packaged one at a time and the expiry date, printed on the packaging, simultaneously reassures the customer of the product’s freshness and makes it easier for the operator to dispose of the surplus properly. However, the brine in which the bite-sized mozzarellas are steeped creates a problem during consumption which is particularly exacerbated in these circumstances. There is very little space on ones tray and nowhere to drain off the liquid. Surprisingly the market has no satisfactory answers. This is precisely where we have stepped in to develop a concept based on a packaging which allows the consumer to solve the problem by