New Smarties Packaging is Not So Smart

Yesterday I was at the movies with my mother and we bought a box of Smarties to share. In the darkened movie theatre, we looked at the box of Smarties. "Is this smaller than the boxes used to be?" I asked. "Yes of course it is. Everything is smaller now," my mother replied. She had a point. Pretty much everything is smaller now and more expensive.

Who knew that I was supposed to open the package from the right end and not the left end.

I opened the box and we were both mystified to see that the Smarties were sectioned into three tubes within the box. The sectioning was achieved by extra pieces of cardboard within the box. We could not understand why this was. "Look it's not even full," my mother pointed out. But nothing ever really is (think of that last bag of chips or box of cereal you bought- it wasn't full). This box was only filled to about 3/4 full with Smarties in their three little sections. We had no idea how you would eat the Smarties. Being in three sections would make the Smarties go everywhere if you tried to tip them into your hand. So, we did what my parents always do at the movies and tipped the whole box into the bag of popcorn.

Extra cardboard creates three individual sections for the Smarties to sit in.

I took the box with me home so that I could get a photo of it and that's when I discovered the purpose of the three sections. Turns out that we had opened the box at the wrong end.

Or eat them all at once. I don't need some guilt trip or directive from a package, thank you very much.

The box said "make 'em last." Yeah, right. I don't know anyone who would buy a regular sized box of Smarties and then save them through three different sittings. Sure the calorie content for each section was clearly set out on the box, but who wants to eat just 10 Smarties or so at a time? It's unrealistic and in the process the company has used even more resources in their packaging, ie. extra cardboard.

Door number one.

Door number two.

All three doors open.

I think that this calorie counting packaging experiment should be abandoned by Smarties. I mean at least 50% of people are going to open the package from the wrong end either through inattention or from not being able to see that there is a particular end to open (badly lit movie theatres, lost reading glasses, whatever) and those that do open the package from the right end are most likely just going to eat them all in one go anyways, so it seems like just a waste of packaging. It's overpackaging.