Wednesday 26 October 2022

Are your food and drink products disabled and elderly friendly?

I am not disabled nor particularly elderly, but I was faced this morning with a rather problematic carton of very delicious oat milk. 

I sighed when I realised I was faced with a pull tab. A pull tab which was difficult to access and hard to open without the milk spilling out all over the place. 

This set me to thinking. If it was difficult for me, how much harder must it be for people who face physical limitations, are suffering from rheumatism or arthritis, etc.

 It doesn't matter the high quality of the food or drink that your are supplying to your customers, if you haven't made an effort to ensure that all your customers can easily access or serve your products, then that's very unfair on your disabled and elderly customers, isn't it? 

Easy-to-open pull cans are the absolute devil to open if you are disabled, have arthritis, rheumatism, etc. So calling them easy-to-open is somewhat of an oxymoron. 

Returning to milk cartons, if some dairies and vegan dairies can use easy to open cartons, why can't they all do this? 

Sometimes those pull tab milk cartons don't open because the pull tab breaks off, leaving the milky contents unavailable unless the poor consumer has to take a pair of scissors or a potentially dangerous sharp knife to attempt to hack their way into the carton.

I think it would be helpful if food and drink manufacturers liaised with carton, bottle, tin and food container manufacturers to make certain that the food containers they use for their products are easy to access for all of their customers. 

There are organisations that you could reach out to for potential help to make sure that your food and drink containers are disabled friendly.

I believe you owe it to your customers to make your products easily accessible to all.

https://www.humanity-inclusion.org.uk

https://www.gov.uk/rights-disabled-person

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk

https://app.croneri.co.uk/topics/disability-access/indepth

(Image courtesy of Licht-aus and Pixabay)


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