Boxes full of treasures

The hotels and restaurants are making an early bid to commemorate the Mid-Autumn Festival, a major event in the food and beverage industry’s calendar. The competition is intense and new mooncake flavours are de rigueur at this time of year.

Increasingly, the mooncake purveyors are taking extra steps to ensure that the excitement begins well before the actual festival in September — with beautifully designed boxes, carrier bags and other paraphernalia.

The Tung Lok group of restaurants, Singapore’s largest manufacturer at 180,000 boxes, unveiled eight different packaging designs,alongside 28 varieties of mooncakes.

“This year’s packaging highlights a stunning qipao-clad model whom we engaged from China,” says the group’s executive director Tjioe Ka In.

“In the past, we have showcased different images of Shanghainese ladies on our mooncake packaging. These images reflect culture, poise and elegance, which are synonymous with the image of Tung Lok restaurants.”

Sheraton Towers Singapore has 200 collectible Imperial Jewel Treasure boxes. “This stunning brown treasure box is sprinkled with gold dust for the extra sparkle,” says Ms Ernawati Setijo, the hotel’s assistant director for marketing communications.

“It will definitely keep your treasures safe beyond the mooncake festival.” The hotel’s eco-friendly agenda will also see it distributing non-woven carrier bags this year.

Another hotel that has chosen to be environmentally friendly for the Mid-Autumn Festival is Goodwood Park.

It introduced a new reusable fabric bag for its mooncakes, adapting last year’s paperbag design but removing the Chinese “mooncakes” characters and other elements related to Mid-Autumn Festival so that the bags can be reused.

Orchard Hotel and Fairmont Singapore’s mooncake box offerings take inspiration from treasure chests and cheongsams respectively.

For the latter, a lot of thought was given to the colour of the packaging — the striking fuschia and turquoise boxes will appeal more to the younger set, while the interplayn of red and gold will be well-liked among the older generation.

Back by popular demand is Marina Mandarin’s limited edition art series mooncake box from last year. It stems from the hotel’s pledged support of local and Asian arts and is exclusively designed by local pop artist Justin Lee with his signature motifs inspired by traditional red paper-cuts.

Marina Mandarin also debuts another limited edition Imperial Treasure Chest with 500 sets. The box is designed to “give an elegant look befitting royalty”. It contains any four flavours of its traditional mooncakes.

Preparations for the Mid-Autumn mooncake rush started months before the festival.

Ms Setijo says: “The food and beverage and marketing  communications teams, together with our suppliers, start planning and brainstorming for ideas straight after the previous Mid-Autumn Festival. This is because the production process is very intricate and takes time.”

The team at Tung Lok started work about six months ago. Ms Tjioe says: “Our executive chairman, Mr Andrew Tjioe, involves himself personally when it comes to the design aspects of the packaging, from image to colour to typeface. He has a distinct idea of what he wants and works closely with our designers to conceptualise the packaging."

Another reason for the long lead-in is that the organisations have time to parlay the concept into other marketing materials.

Ms Belladonnah Lim, director of marketing communications in Fairmont Sinagpore, says: “Our graphic designer conceives the design after a series of discussions and briefs. We brainstorm on the various ways of folding of the box, colours and patterns, contrasting textures, placement of logos, and embellishments and special effects.”

The restaurants and hotels say the effort and expense are worth it. With customers snapping up the mooncakes during the festival, this is a money-making business.

The Fairmont sells some 55,000 boxes of mooncakes a year and it expects this number to grow. “Our mooncakes and mooncake packaging play equal roles in the successful sale of our mooncakes. Adding to this is our reputation and good name, they give us an advantage in the face of stiff competition,” says Ms Lim.

Mr Rene Teuscher, general manager of Orchard Hotel, observes: “Having a unique concept and design will certainly give us an advantage in terms of product offerings and market competition."

“It is important to constantly keep up with market demands and look for innovative designs and flavours to stay ahead of competition and meet the demands of affluent customers.”

Ms Tjioe adds: “As a group that is well-known to be innovative, customers expect us to elevate their level of experience, be it dining in our restaurants or through our products such as mooncakes."

“We need to constantly differentiate ourselves by creating new packaging and new mooncake flavours to stand out amidst the competition. The investment is definitely necessary and worthwhile."