Written to the prompt D is for Dear
Best Before
Dear People Who Design Packaging,
One day, if I don’t get to you first, you’ll be as old as me, and you’ll have a kitchen drawer where you’ll keep biros which only work half the time, odd bits of paper for shopping lists, battered boxes of plasters, paracetamols and indigestion tablets, a thermometer, some tweezers, several bits of string that aren’t quite long enough for whatever you need them for and a magnifying glass.
You’ll mainly use the magnifying glass not to help you get splinters out of someone’s finger, but to try to decipher what’s written on packaging.
Now, when you’re designing your packaging on your 98-inch computer screens with your youthful, perfect twenty-twenty vision, having white writing on a light blue background may seem like a stunning, award-winning design choice. But shrink that down to something the size of a sachet of yeast and all I can see is a light blue label that looks as if it’s been rag-rolled by a drunken shrew.
And as for best before dates, well. Prepare to waste your life turning boxes and packets every which way at least seven times before you spot the tiny little figures. That’s if they haven’t been put on with a dot-matrix printer, because they’ll have smudged or rubbed off as soon as you take the thing off the supermarket shelf. Or they’re printed across the embossed top or dimpled bottom of a jar which renders them unreadable unless you’ve been taking some hallucinogenic which magically redistorts everything into focus.
Or they’re incised into the plastic of the cap or stamped into the ridged end of a sachet. Trust me, you’ll spend half your time walking to the kitchen window and peering in vain at the green plastic around the top of a jar of oregano, saying, ‘Can you tell what this says cos I can’t’ and then somebody will come in, put the big light on and have a look, wrinkling their nose in concentration. This is why people of my age have lined faces. It’s why Clint Eastwood squints the way he does – it’s not through making difficult decisions, it’s years of trying to see if his ground coriander’s still in date.
But the worst are fizzy drinks bottles which say ‘For best before date, see cap or neck’. First of all, make your mind up whether it’s on the cap or the neck. We want a drink of lemonade, not go on a treasure hunt. And secondly, you try finding a best before date incised or printed with invisible numbers against a backdrop of a sloshing bubbly liquid.
You’ll have to run your hands all over the neck of the bottle to see if you can determine its whereabouts by touch alone. ‘See cap or neck.’ It could be written on the neck of a flippin’ giraffe gambolling across the African savannah for all that I can see it.
So please, dear people who design packaging, have a heart. Have a care. Have another go, will you?
© Carol Carman 2026
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