Food Packaging Analysis

Food Packaging Analysis
My first lesson learned from this assignment is that I buy too many store-brand items that lack anything of interest for analysis. Those packages are so plain as be almost generic.
So after a search of the pantry, I chose Jif peanut butter. I am the mother of a toddler and one thing that struck me with the overall packaging/advertising of children’s products is a level of diversity that is not always seen in adult products. The packaging of diapers, for example, will include images of white babies, black babies, Asian babies and Hispanic babies. Many of the baby food jars and ads are the same. Something about the innocence of babyhood makes equality of race encouraged.

Back to the Jif package, although every family that I know involves two working parents who more or less share parenting tasks equally, too much packaging and advertising clearly labels mothers as the caretakers. This example is almost so obvious as to be funny: “Choosy Moms Choose Jif.” So apparently, the grocery shopping is done by mom and her “choosy” decision of Jif, validates her concern over her child. This somehow also seems to imply that it is mom who will be using the complex product of peanut butter for the child.

This message is typical of so many mediated messages that both normalize the expectation that women will take the primary role in parenthood – regardless of whether there is a father in the household. (This, of course, also excludes single fathers or families with two dads.) It also adds the value of a mother’s consumer decision be a validation of her role as a mother. In other words, a less “choosy, mother” (less worthy mother) would choose another, likely cheaper, brand. This decision would somehow rob the child of some kind of nutritional superiority.

In thinking back on Jif commercials, I cannot recall a mix of race in terms of mothers featured, although there may have been. What I do recall, in terms of change, is the more recent attempts in Jif commercials to include fathers. A 2010 ad featured the slogan “Choosy Moms … and Dads Choose Jif.” Here is a link to the commercial. (I couldn’t find the imbed code.)

Interesting that the current packaging did not follow the ad campaign and instead continued to focus on mother as the “chooser”.