Each “Miyabi Monaka” contains monaka wafers in a plastic bag and sweet bean paste in a plastic bag. Since you sandwich the sweet bean paste between the wafers just before eating, you can enjoy this traditional Japanese sweet just as though it were homemade. The package designs of similar products by other companies often have the monaka wafers in plastic bags and the sweet bean paste in plastic bags stacked on top of each other, then tied together with paper sashes or placed inside boxes. By contrast, our package design lines up the components next to each other rather than stacking them two by two.

This results in an overall 2 to 1 shape (because the monaka wafers and sweet bean paste are both close to square), and we realized that these are the same proportions as a tatami mat. So we played up this Japanese style concept and created an even more unique “tea room” design. The individual packages are designed with tatami motifs to evoke a Japanese room. We also came up with a separate sleeve style package design in addition to the individual packages. This made it possible to (1) show a traditional fireplace, a unique feature of a tea room, and (2) create tea rooms in 2-mat, 3-mat, 4.5-mat, 18-mat, and various other sizes.

For example, for a 4.5-mat tea room, we can use this sleeve as is for buffer material, and it functions as a half-mat sized fireplace. For different sized tea rooms, a sleeve can be put over the outside of an individual package to create a 1-mat sized fireplace, and in this way we can produce a tea room of almost any size. As explained above, it is possible to display a wide variety of products in sets of 4 (4.5 mats), 8 (8 mats), 18 (18 mats), and so on. The backs of the individual packages are decorated with designs other than the tatami motif so they can be sold individually. There are two flavors: Numazu City specialty mandarin orange (Jutaro mandarin orange), and Numazu tea.

Design: Latona Marketing Inc.

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