MAGNOLIA started as an ice cream brand in 1925, but it wasn’t long that it began to carry dairy products—as basic as milk, for instance—sold in bottles. By the pre-war years, the company’s MAGNOLIA MILK had become an established brand, sold carafe shaped clear glass bottles, and promoted for its taste and health benefits.
The years that followed showed MAGNOLIA’s bottles dairy lines expanding. In 1957, a milk-based chocolate drink, Choco-Vim, came out in bottles of various shapes—one looked like a soda bottle, but most came in short, squat bottles with sloping sides and a small opening.
Around the 60s, the dairy bottles were standardized. The clear bottles had straight sides, ending with a narrow opening, with an applied blue colored label bearing the distinctive blue Magnolia logo , the product name, and topped by a scrimped carboard crown, further protected and sealed by a pull-out-tab.
Both its white milk product, now branded as Magnolia Fresh Cow’s Milk, and its new Magnolia Chocolait line—introduced after the phase out of Choco-Vim—sported these kinds of bottles and were used all throughout the 70s. In 1975, Magnolia Whole Cow’s Recon Milk, a reconstituted fortified milk.
In the 1980s, San Miguel Packaging Products (SMPP) began introducing innovations in packaging designs. The former straight sided bottle lost its rounded corners, and assumed a more streamlined round shape with a short neck and mouth, with a more contemporary applied color label. The name Magnolia, in small case letters, both in open and solid types, circumscribed the middle of the bottle.
This was used across all its milk products line, including the Magnolia Low Fat Milk, a premium milk introduced in 1984. When the fruit juice drink line was launched that same year, they were also packaged in the same bottle.
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| MAGNOLIA LOW FAT MILK, PRINT AD, 1984 |
To address tampering issues, a new Tamper Resistant
Seal was added to safeguard the freshness and purity of Magnolia milk products, as well as its
bottled juice products.
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| MAGNOLIA BOTTLES WITH TAMPER RESISTANT SEALS, 1984 |
By the late 1980s, packaging for products have shifted to using tetra packs and PET bottles, which have the advantage of being lighter, cheaper to produce, and easier to dispose. Carton-based aseptic Tetra packs and flexible doypacks, for example, were more hygienic, thus preserving the integrity of the product. They were easy to carry, saved store space, and even came with their own drinking straws. PET bottles were recyclable, lightweight, and less likely to be broken.
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| A CASE FOR MAGNOLIA GLASS BOTTLES, 1987 |
Magnolia made an effort to extoll the virtues of its
bottled milk products when it put out an omnibus ad that proffered the benefits
of glass bottles. But it was soon clear that the end in sight for glass
bottles---and eventually Magnolia would abandon glass bottles for their
milk products altogether, shifting to standing tetra packs for their Fresh
Milk, Full Cream Milk, Low Fat and Flavored Milk.