The Tyranny of the Bottle: Vitasoy and the Cultural Politics of Packaging

Abstract

Introduction In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Hong Kong beverage company Vitasoy (Weitanai 維他奶) launched an advertising campaign for its soybean milk that tapped into an increasingly prominent public sense of longing for the past, particularly the seemingly less anxious golden era of the 1960s and 1970s. 1 Vitasoy's self-conscious adoption of a nostalgic aesthetic in its commercials cast Vitasoy and its soybean milk as emblematic of an earlier innocence. A drink that accompanied one through life's various transitions: childhood innocence to young love to marriage, Vitasoy presented itself as a marker of both individual memories and collective histories, a symbol of trust in a time of uncertainty and dislocation (Chan 2015). The Vitasoy product appeared in each frame, but in two different packaging forms: the small tetra-pak box with a crooked neck straw and the curved, clear soda bottle. These packaging forms are the material 'we see but we don't see' (Cochoy and Grandclément 2005). Within the context of Vitasoy's advertising campaign, the soda bottle and tetra-pak are evocative of different temporal moments (e.g., past and present) and reflective of the company's branding. Beyond these gestures towards reflective nostalgia and Hong Kong identity, the packaging would appear to serve no other function beyond technical utility (i.e., that which holds and transports soybean milk) and marketing (Figure 1). The specificity of the packaging was, it would seem, incidental to "Vitasoy's exploitation of nostalgia and local historicity to reinvent its brand" (Chan 2015: 170). Despite the deliberate allusions to an earlier period in both Vitasoy's and Hong Kong's history, there was a limit to which Vitasoy would draw upon the past. The one packaging form absent from Vitasoy's affective excursion was the milk bottle, the original packaging material for Vitasoy's soybean milk in the 1940s (Figure 2). Indeed, for most Hong Kong consumers and due to the prominence with which Vitasoy has become associated with the classic soda bottle of the 1960s, the fact that Vitasoy was once sold in milk bottles may come as a surprise. So long as packaging is seen, but not seen, Vitasoy's milk Emory University, US