30 July 2015

The first person to see the potential of fruit and vegetables as a natural packing for the transport and preservation of food was the brilliant Bruno Munari. In a wonderful chapter of his book Da cosa nasce cosa the Milanese designer describes how the structure of the orange and the pea pod makes them perfect systems of packaging that nature provides to consumers, without any need for supplementary mechanisms. Many years later the Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa went down the same road, with a series of prototypes of 100 per cent natural containers for fruit juice in which the texture, colors and external appearance of the fruit were reproduced in the form of a Tetra Brik, with no obvious labeling. Now the prolific Oki Sato, driving force of the Nendo studio, has followed in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessors and come up with a design for the Shiawase Banana. These much-prized bananas are grown on a plantation at an altitude of over 1000 meters in a national park located in the north-central region of the island of Mindanao, in the Philippines, using only organic fertilizers and keeping the application of pesticides to a minimum. The packaging of these bananas seems to be at exactly the midpoint between the inspiration provided by nature, indicated to us by Munari, and the confusion of the real and artificial in Fukasawa’s design. Nendo has created a sticker that faithfully reproduces the color and texture of the banana peel and which can itself be “peeled off” to reveal nutritional information about this special fruit on a background resembling the banana’s flesh. Thus its story is told in a manner that stirs the visual curiosity of consumers and persuades them to make a spontaneous gesture. Equally mimetic is the package for transport of the whole fruit, with graphic notes and further information that exploit the “foldability” of another paper support, larger this time and in the shape of a banana leaf. It is a way of recounting a story of good cultivation and production, able to convey a positive message even in the name: shiawase in Japanese means “happiness.”