With flavors like chocolate, lemon and cinnamon, Honey Tube breaks the rules by hiding the delicious nectar of the bees in a metal tube instead of a see-through jar.

Good looking package no doubt, and food in tubes is popular throughout Europe. But besides a few gourmet pesto sauces in the U.S., as good a package as it is, I do not see more food in tubes flying onto U.S. shelves.

Great packaging ideas abound--wine in a box, cereal in a pouch, and honey in a tube. But the American public is one big creature of habit.

The day I started this job 25 years ago the flexible folks told me bag-in-box cereal was dead.

The last time I trolled the aisles of our local Safeway, all I saw was bag-in-box cereals. Doesn’t mean pouches have not taken off in a lot of other segments, but some categories are just too traditional to try to “break set” and come up with a whole new package.

At Shelf Impact’s Package Design Workshop this week in Cincinnati, twenty four suppliers, designers and CPGs--all involved in package design--gave an assessment of a set of German packages containing mustard and mayonnaise in tubes.

“Never happen here” was the consensus. “Looks too much like toothpaste or diaper rash ointment. “

Funnily enough, two of us confessed to brushing our teeth once by accident with Balmex. Wish it had been honey!

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