Nonstick mayo bottle helps 'bring out all the best'

With the new Hellmann's® Easy Out! Non-Stick package, consumers can stop scraping, shaking and banging their bottles to get at the last bit of their mayonnaise, promises mayo maker Unilever, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. “In an effort to continually delight consumers, we listened to their comments, both in focus groups and also from our consumer hotline, and we began working on a package to make it easier for consumers to get all the mayonnaise out of the bottle,” relates Melanie Huet, associate brand manager for Hellmann's.

Introduced in March in grocery, club and mass-merchandise stores nationwide, the new Easy Out! bottle adds a distinctive, almost rectangular package to the company's lineup of bottle formats for mayonnaise, which includes a standard jar in glass and plastic, and an inverted, squeezable, kid-friendly bottle. Huet adds that the new Easy Out! bottle design also allows for easy storage in the refrigerator door. “Plus, the new cap dispenses the mayonnaise in a ribbon for even distribution and less waste,” she says.

The 24-oz package, used for Real and Light mayonnaise varieties, was in development for one year and owes its nonstick properties to a specially formulated inner bottle surface that provides the required slip properties. While the bottle supplier is confidential, Unilever says the package is a multilayer construction of polypropylene/ethyl vinyl alcohol/PP. The two-piece, flip-top dispensing closure, also from a proprietary supplier, sports a complementary, square design with rounded corners and an oblong hole that dispenses the condiment in a ribbon shape.

To maximize the bottle's available real estate, Unilever selected a full-body, polyethylene terephthalate glycol shrink label for the bottle that is gravure-printed by a proprietary supplier. Graphics, designed by Sterling Brands (www.sterlingbrands.com), were created to maintain the brand equity of Hellmann's and retain the usage of the brand's signature colors of yellow and blue (dark blue for Real; light blue for Light), while making it simple for consumers to identify the new Easy Out! product enhancement immediately upon viewing the squeeze bottle, Huet explains. Hellmann's Easy Out! Non-Stick Package is available for an average retail cost of $2.85.