Accolade Wines is to revamp its bag in box wine offer, rolling out new compact 1.5-litre packaging in a bid to tackle poor consumer perception of the format.
A 1.5-litre Mud House Sauvignon Blanc Mini Box is to hit Sainsbury’s stores from this week (rsp: £18).
The packaging will also roll out to other 1.5-litre bag in box wines from Mud House, Jam Shed and Hardys throughout October and November.
It delivered a 26% overall size reduction and a 13.6% cardboard by weight reduction compared with Accolade’s previous 1.5-litre format, according to the winemaker.
The innovation was part of a push to bring bag in box wine out of “the naughty corner” of supermarkets and into the mainstream, said Lucy Ramsay, Accolade’s head of portfolio for innovation and sustainability in Europe.
Bag in box wine still had “huge consumer barriers” around quality perception to tackle, Ramsay admitted.
“We’ve exacerbated a lot of those through the way we’ve treated packaging, the wines, the ranges we’ve put in them and where they are in stores,” she said. “Our strategy is about trying to tackle all of those things in tandem.”
Accolade undertook significant consumer research ahead of relaunching its 1.5-litre format, Ramsay said. Findings showed although practicality, portion control and sustainability were important factors driving uptake of bag in box wine among younger consumers, older shoppers remained more attached to traditional glass bottles.
A key message that resonated with all age groups, however, was that bag in box packaging kept wine fresh for up to six weeks after opening.
This benefit has therefore been highlighted with a logo on all four sides of Accolade’s new 1.5-litre mini box.
“We won’t really bombard consumers about the sustainability side, because that’s the business to business reason for doing this,” Ramsay said. “What gets the consumer excited is that the wine stays fresh for six weeks, which we’ve been remiss in not telling people clearly in the past.”
The new packaging also contains a template showing exactly what colour the wine contained inside is, and an explanation that the pack contains the equivalent of two regular glass bottles of wine.
Together, the improvements would help “erode all those things that consumers currently don’t necessarily know when they look at a box of wine”, Ramsay said.
Accolade’s long-term ambition was to get bag in box “out of that naughty corner, visible on feature and display, and eventually into the main wine aisle”, she added.
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