Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2015 November 20

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November 20

Packaging in different languages

I can't find an example of this right now, but I assure you it's a thing so please bear with me. This is in regards to products which are available both in the UK and continental Europe. I'm not talking about the USA, so please don't answer with reference to US practice as it is not relevant to my question. The same product has the same packaging, except that in the UK the small print (ingredients, chemical contents, instructions for use, whatever) is only in English, whereas in continental Europe the small print is given in a number of different European languages (typically French, German, Spanish, maybe Italian). So my question is, why do they make different packaging for the UK? Why not just make one package for the whole of Europe and include English with those other languages? I repeat, the product is exactly the same (no difference in the ingredients etc). Many thanks, --Viennese Waltz 09:45, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Consider the relabelling of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor / Battenberg to Mountbatten. It may be just a marketing plot. For all I know, Mercedes shifts their steering wheel to the wrong side in cars produced for the British market. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 11:53, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Are there different labeling requirements for EU countries and the UK? I know that the UK is nominally part of the EU, but there are certain provisions they are exempt from, perhaps this is one? --Jayron32 12:38, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

The UK is bound by EU food labelling regulations [1] ... that legislation allows member states to impose language requirements [2] and according to United Kingdom food labelling regulations (without source) the UK requires food ingradient lists to be in English. I concur with Dbfirs's answer, below, but speculate that other factors are at work: UK firms are more likely to produce UK only labels for the (dominant) home market (and non-UK companies relatively less likely to); and the scale and flexibility of enterprises will also bear on their propensity to provide single-language labels for specific markets. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:13, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Occasionally we see products here in the UK with the multiple languages (i.e. European packaging), but our natural xenophobia means that sellers usually provide English-only packaging for the home market. Many consumers prefer English-only wording because then they are reassured that the product is made in England. I'm not defending the British attitude, just observing it. Dbfirs 22:08, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

There are also more practical reasons. A product labeled in several languages must use smaller writing, contain fewer details in each language, or have larger labels. One option is to label different sides of the product in different languages, but then the stockperson has to be careful to put the English side facing out. In any case, it may be more work for the consumer to find the part(s) that they can read. So, the question to the manufacturer is whether the additional cost involved in separate labeling is justified by the increased customer convenience. Of course, there are also some people in the UK who can't read English, and can read another language, but that's a relatively small number. StuRat (talk) 09:24, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

My usual breakfast cereal is sold in the UK with labels on the side of the box in many languages - including Arabic, so not just European languages. If I hadn't seen it stocked in a large and premium supermarket chain, I might have thought that I was buying a slightly dodgy grey / parallel import that was intended to be sold "somewhere foreign". And if it was a dodgy grey / parallel import, that would raise real questions over quality or even safety. To give a real example, Tim Tam biscuits are iconic and popular in Australia, but the same company also manufactures slightly different varieties of the biscuit under the "Tim Tam" brand name in Indonesia which are intended for the South East Asian market. However, the Indonesian varieties do sometimes reach Australia as grey / parallel imports - presumably because they are cheaper, and they are inferior in terms of both the quality of packaging and the taste of the product. So it's not just xenophobia that drives a preference for things that "do not look foreign".

So clearly some foods are allowed to be sold in the UK with foreign text on it, the reason why manufacturers might print different, English-only labels is, I think, mostly down to consumer preference. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 12:06, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

You may find that the packaging is made locally in the UK for the UK market, in which case, why bother taking up valuable real estate with other languages? --Dweller (talk) 13:43, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

That isn't an answer to the question posed. If you're saying that the products aren't sold outside the UK at all, then that's an answer but to a different scenario since the OP specified that the product is sold outside the UK with everything the same except the packaging. If you're saying the products are sold outside the UK and produced and packaged at the same place but with different packaging for different markets, then that still isn't actually an answer since the OP's question was why someone would bother making a packaging destined solely for the UK when in a world where it was irrelevant, it would seem cheaper for them to only make one packaging and sell it in the UK and everywhere else. I don't think anyone is surprised if they did have some reason to make a variant of their product with the intention to sell that variant in the UK only, they would print English only (and if they did print anything else it would be Welsh, Irish etc), but it doesn't help answer the OP's question of why they would do so. If you're saying that the product is sold outside the UK in different packaging that happens elsewhere but packaged in the UK for the UK market, there's still the question of why they would do this (quality control, cheapier to export the stuff unpackaged etc). And in any case, this also doesn't seem to fit with the OP's scenario of everything being the same with the same packaging but different languages. While technically this could occur in such a scenario, far more likely if the packaging is being made and done in different places for different markets, you will end up with differences in the packaging design as well as potential differences in weights. Nil Einne (talk) 04:45, 24 November 2015 (UTC)