BeeNZ’s luxury Manuka honey packaging mostly for its export product has taken out the printing industry’s top award at this year’s prestigious Pride In Print awards.
Winners are usually announced at a glittering dinner event, but this year the awards have been announced online because of Covid.
Pride In Print is seen as the annual benchmarking event for the printing, packaging, signage and graphic arts industries and attracts hundreds of entries from all over New Zealand.
BeeNZ is a major exporter of New Zealand Manuka honey, along with other brands. Its first export was made in early 2016 to China followed closely by Hong Kong and Singapore.
Today, the Bay of Plenty company exports to over 13 countries worldwide including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, USA and Mexico. Ninety percent of product manufactured by BeeNZ is supplied direct to export markets.
Family owned and operated BeeNZ was formed in 2015 by David & Julie Hayes who manage the entire process from hive to bottle, being beekeeper, extractor, processor, packer and exporter, unusual for honey producers in this country.
Meanwhile their luxury presentation box “with class written all over it” according to one judge, carries a pot of New Zealand’s top quality Manuka honey with a UMF 29+ rating, complete with metal spoon and a passport hand stitched booklet. It has deservedly won Pride In Print’s 2020 Supreme Award.
The BeeNZ presentation box first won best in category for Paper & Board Packaging from entries all over New Zealand. It was entered by Logick Print & Graphics, a small Auckland company that has now taken out three Supreme awards in eight years for top quality, high end packaging and printing work.
Designed by the two-man Tauranga brand and advertising agency Society, the packaging was explained by co-founder Tom Lear: “The dark green was inspired by the deep remote bush of New Zealand where the high potency Mānuka is sourced. The use of gold foil emboss paired with a more fluid blind deboss creates a luxury tactile feel, while a gold laminate finish on the inside of the box creates a beautiful glow on the jar.
“The jar inside is a black violet glass vessel sourced from Europe to ensure the product is kept at a premium level. Alongside the jar, there’s a gold hand-crafted spoon and hand stitched information booklet with gold foil details which all add to the overall finish.”
Judges poured over the gift box, with judge Natasha Poznanovic saying it was a piece of art...and “what’s not to love,” before it was unanimously declared the overall winner.
Their praise included its ‘perfect embossing’, the friction fixed design that held the pottle in place, the detail on the purpose-made lightweight machine tooled metal spoon, and the overall design.
The gift box stood out from everything else in the in the Paper & Board Packaging category, judges added.
Pride In Print judge Shane Goggin said the gift box was impressive. It had obviously been through numerous machines, ‘all of it older equipment’, but they’d just “pulled something out of a box,” it was very hard to fault, he added.
They’d also successfully trialled and used a gold laminate polyester.
“Structurally, it would have been very hard to get the die cut angles correct, and it comes with the self friction hold for the jar plus a cardboard seal at the top for a tamper-free finish.”
The box catches the light and reflects up into the jar, and the booklet stitching is left untrimmed at one end to reflect the antennae of a bee.
The box is also debossed on four sides and each foiled image tells a story. The foiled images were a New Zealand map, a clock, a bee and a sunrise.
“The more we looked at it, the more detail we saw, and every detail was perfect. It was fascinating. This box goes a long way to being a collectable corporate gift. It looks expensive and luxurious, something people might keep,” Goggin said.
Logick’s first Supreme Award win in Pride In Print was in 2012 and in 2017 it took it out again over stiff competition, also for its luxury honey packaging. Logick produced and entered The True Honey Company’s tamper-proof presentation case which judges in 2017 said was imaginative, eye catching and reflected the premium quality honey inside.
Awards manager, Sue Archibald said judges were equally impressed with Logick’s 2020 entry. “This printer just keeps raising the bar– the work presented here is simply stunning.
“It just shows that small companies can most certainly take on big ones and come out the champion, not just once but in this case three times! Now that’s a seriously impressive record.”
Photo: David Gick from Logick Print & Graphics with the award.