My wife and I vacationed in Europe this summer, and I couldn’t help but notice that package design, package labeling, and product marketing are handled differently on the other side of the pond.

Sweet or Dry?

My wife is from Prague, so we spent several days there. One thing that has always perplexed me is how Czechs can be so straightforward about designating a wine as dry or semi-dry, whereas in the United States it is often a guessing game.

In the Czech Republic, suche (dry), polosuche (semi-dry) or sladké (sweet) routinely appear on the wine bottle — sometimes on the back label if not prominently on the front label. Corresponding designations are used in other parts of Europe, such as seco for dry in Portugal.

In the United States, my experience has been that such explicit labeling is harder to come by. Reasons could be: the lack of legal requirements for labels to state the exact sugar content; dryness can be subjective (on the tongue of the beholder); and the winemaker’s choice not to highlight the dryness or sweetness of the wine.

Still or Sparkling (or something in between)?

Czechs are ahead of us in one regard: Whereas we usually choose between still and sparkling water, they have a third option.

If you purchase, say, a two-liter bottle of water in the Czech Republic, your choices are neperlivá (still), perlivá (sparkling, or carbonated) and jemně perlivá (lightly carbonated, or gently sparkling). Why we haven’t achieved this level of sophistication in the United States is beyond me.

Of course, regardless of the level of carbonation, all of the two-liter plastic bottles of water that we purchased in Prague had tethered caps. That’s because the European Union’s Single-Use Plastics Directive went into effect in July of 2024. The aim of the Directive is to reduce unintended environmental waste and facilitate the recycling of caps and closures along with their containers. Plastic caps and lids are required to remain attached to beverage containers of up to three liters in volume.

Ice, Ice, Maybe

While there is some truth to the perception that Europe has never embraced the concept of ice quite as wholeheartedly as we have in the States, sourcing ice was relatively easy in most places that we visited — with a few exceptions.

One of our flights on Turkish Airlines represented one of the exceptions, with the attendant informing me at one point that they had simply run out of ice.

During our vacation, we frequently found ourselves in search of ice cubes because the place where we were staying (Airbnb, etc.) had no ice cube trays.

In Istanbul, I went to the supermarket and found freezer after freezer full of ice cream treats. Finally, I stumbled across a freezer with ice cubes (the ratio of ice cream freezers to ice cube freezers must have been six to one). The freezer was full of plastic cups with ice cubes in them. Perhaps not the most eco-friendly way to sell ice, but it works, I guess.

These are just some lighthearted observations on the differences between Europe and the United States when it comes to packaging. However, in the coming months, we’ll continue to report on weightier matters, such as the impact of Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) in Europe and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation in the United States.

Brad Addington
Chief Editor, Packaging Strategies
(248) 227-4727
addingtonb@bnpmedia.com