In a world at war, your chip packets are now also black and white

The colour may be gone, but the crunch will stay. That is the resolve of Calbee, a Japanese snack maker known as much for its colourful packaging as for the taste of its shrimp chips and potato sticks. With shipping through the Strait of Hormuz experiencing severe disruption and the supply of hydrocarbons and specialised industrial minerals, among the hardest hit is the supermarket’s munchies aisle — largely because the packaging for these products, dependent on petroleum-derived chemicals, is becoming more difficult to manufacture. Calbee’s workaround — it has been hit by a shortage of printing ink — is to go black and white.

Even before the war hit the supply of pigment categories like Phthalocyanine blues and greens and Azo reds, oranges and yellows, the great colour disruption was underway. Whether because of climate change, geopolitical upheavals or the Covid disruption, global supply chains for paints and inks were being reshaped by sudden shortages.

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In a world wobbling under the weight of war, small disruptions can feel catastrophic. Perhaps there is something reassuring in the continued, albeit transformed, availability of snacks. Yet, it is also a fact that colour theory has long been used to guide consumer behaviour. Calbee’s solution may work for the moment, but the desaturation of its vibrant red and yellow packaging may just reshape consumer behaviour in ways that crunch cannot offset: When the world loses colours, appetite itself begins to change.