The Blue Box: history of the suit that has clothed Barilla pasta for almost a century
12 March 2024
People who love and choose our pasta are used to recognising it at a glance among the options available on supermarket shelves. Our Blue Box has always stood out for the elegance of its appearance and the brilliance of its colour – a particular, identifying shade of blue that has clothed our pasta for almost a century.
But have you ever wondered when this iconic packaging was born? Do you know where this elegant attire comes from?
At the beginning of the last century, there was a shop in the heart of Parma founded in 1877 by Pietro Barilla Senior. It was a small but well-stocked and very busy store.
Inside the shop, large dark wooden cupboards held a precious commodity - our pasta, welcoming customers with its golden colour and natural smell.
If you look carefully, there are no packages in sight, neither on the shelves nor on the large wooden counter facing the entrance. There is something, however, which does resemble a packaging, and the colour of which is reminiscent of our Blue Box.
BLUE FOOD PAPER, THE ANCESTOR OF THE BLUE BOX
At the beginning of the last century, our pasta was still sold loose. The shopkeeper could show customers the many formats available in the cupboard drawers and then collect the chosen one using a large shovel, wrapping the amount required in a special sheet of light blue food paper that perfectly matched the warm shade of our pasta, sealing it with a lithographed label bearing our brand.
Packaging the pasta in sugar paper, using a skill now forgotten, may have seemed like an ancient gesture. Yet that gesture already harboured a revolutionary, cutting-edge communication idea which, a few decades later, led to the birth of the Blue Box.
PIETRO BARILLA MEETS ERBERTO CARBONI: THE BLUE BOX IS BORN
Communication applied to the world of commerce is that complex system of signs and symbols - spaces and their arrangement, colours, logos, shop signs, billboards... - which, taken together, are intended to make an impression, to capture the attention of the observer, while at the same time giving them a solid and coherent image of our identity.
It was therefore a short step from the blue packaging used to sell loose pasta to creating the first Blue Box. When Pietro Barilla visited the United States in 1950 and discovered the existence of supermarkets, and with them a new distribution model still unknown in Europe, his intuition was based on solid foundations - those of a company that had already understood how to promote itself.
Therefore, on his return from the United States, Pietro Barilla called on the great designer Erberto Carboni to start curating our image. The outcome was a coordinated profile, pioneering for the time, which Carboni was able to materialise into a brand, a packaging, an advertising format that began to transform us into what we are today.
In 1956, our first Blue Box, designed by Erberto Carboni, finally saw the light. And its colour, chosen by Carboni and Pietro Barilla, is the same as that of the sheet of paper with which our pasta was sold loose in the shop.
FROM ITALIAN ICON TO INTERNATIONAL SYMBOL
Until the 1970s, the packaging designed by Carboni evolved and transformed, while retaining its blue soul. Other images and elements then began to appear on our Blue Boxes: first we see the pasta being literally poured into the pot, then the now classic fork appears next to the pasta. Meanwhile, recipes and information start to appear on the back of the packaging to ennoble the product and remind consumers that with our pasta “It's Sunday every day”.
In the early nineties, the Blue Box was developed further. To cope with the spread of department stores, the colour was softened and a window added to let customers see the pasta inside. The company felt the need to print the word “Italy” on the packaging, together with the colours of the Italian flag.
Our products are now a symbol of quality and goodness at international level.
THE NEW BLUE BOX, FOR A MORE SUSTAINABLE TOMORROW
The Blue Box we are familiar with today first appeared in 2022. The highest quality cardboard packaging, fully recyclable, from responsibly managed forests.
One of the reasons our new Blue Box is completely recyclable is because when designing it we decided to eliminate the plastic window. An even more sustainable solution, which allows us to save 126,000 kg of unnecessary materials every year.
The result of these choices we made is a one-of-a-kind package, made even more iconic by the deep blue we have adopted, the presence of our new logo and the introduction of a fresh and modern visual identity - features which led the Blue Box to victory in the Best Packaging 2023 Quality Design competition, organised by the Italian Institute of Packaging.
“This new visual identity and our commitment to sustainability – said Gianluca di Tondo, our Chief Executive Officer – bring the Barilla brand even closer to achieving our vision of the future: pasta as a gesture of love not only for people but also for the planet, thanks to more conscious daily choices”.
OUR PLAYLIST OF THE MONTH
If you want to delve deeper into the topics we have just addressed, here are some reading, listening and watching suggestions:
- The food programme, a podcast by BBC Radio 4 that investigates every aspect of the food we eat. In the episode “The secret life of spaghetti” Dan Saladino looks at our relationship with this pasta shape, focusing on his visit to Pedrignano – our biggest pasta factory in the world;
- Packaging the Brand: The Relationship Between Packaging Design and Brand Identity, a book by Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris that analyses packaging methods and techniques;
- Mad Men, a TV series by Matthew Weiner that analyses American society in the 1960s through events at Sterling & Cooper, a large New York advertising agency.
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