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| Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity |
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15/12/2009 |
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Sustainable packaging to communicate the excellence of Presidia products
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 Proper packaging, in line with the sustainable principles governing the Presidia, is of fundamental importance in communicating the excellence of a product and securing new market opportunities. For this reason, following the outstanding results achieved with the Brazilian Barù Nut Presidium, the Slow Food Foundation has launched a collaboration with DoDesign-s, a dynamic design and communication studio in Belo Horizonte which particularly focuses on fair-trade consultancy work, providing marketing and sustainable packaging assistance to South American
Presidia.
The first training courses were held from October 5 to 11 for the Chilean Merkén and Blue Egg Hen Presidia.
 Anna Paula Diniz Guasti, art director of DoDesign-s, visited Chile and met the producers of the two Presidia together with collaborators of CET Sur, an NGO working on development for Chilean rural communities. The two seminars involved a theoretical part in the classroom and a few days visiting communities, in which Anna taught the producers from the two Presidia to look at their environment with new eyes, looking for traditional natural materials which might be used in the product packaging and in designing labels.
At San Nicolas, Anna met the Araucana hen breeders and discussed the best way to store the blue eggs and transport them for sale around the country; the meeting also helped to strengthen the Presidium producer workgroup, which established a common selling price for the eggs.
“The Mapuche merkén producers also had a great spirit of cooperation” Anna told us, “though it is a much more varied group. Some of the Mapuche women with a marked commercial flair were already thinking about exporting while others just sold merkén on the local market, but they all fully understood the importance of having certification of origin and production rules guaranteeing the original merkén recipe. For women in the most isolated communities, this was their first opportunity to compare their experience with other producers and at the end of the seminar they all agreed to meet again and examine the issues raised.”
Our current objective is to repeat this positive approach for the other Presidia in Latin America which need better packaging, and to present the results of the work at the next Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre.
Photos by Anna Paula Guasti Diniz
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