Sunsweet Mixed Fruit Package
notes: label: Description
content: In 1939, Walter Landor arrived in the United States to help install the British training pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. At twenty-six years old, Landor had left his home in Germany to study art and design in Britain, where he became the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society of Industrial Artists. With whispers of war circulating around Europe, Landor decided to stay in the United States and travelled to the West Coast in search of design work. In 1941, Landor and his new wife Josephine Martinelli founded Walter Landor and Associates (today Landor) in their San Francisco apartment. The company specialized in packaging and label design for a number of iconic brands ranging from Marlboro cigarettes to Aunt Jemima to Sara Lee. As the company expanded, Landor’s base of operations moved from his home through several locations until it settled in 1962 on the Klamath, a docked ferryboat in the San Francisco Bay that would become an iconic part of Landor’s own brand.
label: Description
content: Sunsweet is a worldwide company known for its dried fruit products including prunes, peaches, and apricots. In 1917, the company founded the California Prune and Apricot Growers Association to unite 5,000 statewide growers into a cooperative fruit market. In 1946, Sunsweet changed their packaging to the company’s hallmark “gravure-printed aluminum-foil packaging.” However, as impulse-purchasing trended in the postwar market, the company hired Landor to redesign their product line. Landor created a product that emphasized the company’s logo and golden foil that would be familiar to Sunsweet’s loyal customers. The containers also included a realistic picture of the featured fruit and suggested dishes (however, the box did not provide the recipes) in an effort to differentiate between products and entice customers to impulsively buy the products. When debuting the redesigned products, the company provided stores with giant dried fruit box replicas to hold the product, banners, free recipe booklets, and life-size cutouts of happy housewives as in-store advertising aids. Sunsweet’s satisfaction with Landor inspired the company to add a credit line to the right-hand side panel of the products.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Bequest of Walter and Josephine Landor
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1993.0393.059
label: accession number
content: 1993.0393
label: catalog number
content: 1993.0393.059
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Fruit Box
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 13.5 cm x 9.5 cm x 5 cm; 5 5/16 in x 3 3/4 in x 1 15/16 in