Main Project: Lea & Perrins Factory Visit

Factory Exterior

Iconic Orange Doors

I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the Lea & Perrins factory in order to gain a valuable insight into workings there and increase my knowledge of the product and its history, which I felt would be of great benefit to the design process.

The factory was purpose-built in 1897, and you get an impression of that history from the architecture of the building, and the striking doorway featuring the autograph over the bright orange doors.

Barrels

This image shows the barrels in which vegetables are pickled in the first step of creating the sauce, of which there were hundreds. Onions and garlic are pickled whole for over a year, and the whole vegetable is used, even the skin. As Lea & Perrins are moving to adhere to the Heinz Corporate Responsibilities, they are aiming to become a zero waste to landfill company and using whole garlic and onions is a part of that.

Once pickled, the concentrated liquid becomes the base of the sauce while the residue is composted or made into powdered flavouring, and the same is true of the anchovies that are processed to extract the fish oil. Old cold sauce is also used to cool the hot sauce.

Loose labels

In terms of packaging design, we were talked through the way that the cap is pushed down onto the glass bottle with force and not screwed to make it tamper-proof. Loose labels are attached to the bottles in the factory using a thin coating of adhesive, and so alternative labels could be substituted and attached with no change to the labelling system. Bespoke caps and packaging, such as the special edition bottles, can be packaged in another facility.