This is as good an example as I can show of how I go about recovering artwork for long-lost household product, when there isn’t a lot to work with. Last week I found this wonky photo – not even the original poster – with some of the old ETA products from my childhood; only a fragment of the chicken flavour chips package, and it was hidden behind the others.
I really loved this even back in the day as it was already retro-looking then, having not been revised for a very long time, or at least – very out of step with the current graphics trends of the 1980’s. I wasn’t able to find any references at all which I thought was amazing for such a popular product over the years. So with a lot of work with Adobe programs, and some imagination as well, I was able to reconstruct the design.
Note: Due to repetitive theft by those who take my intellectual property from this blog without my permission, and reproduce it as merchandise for sale on sites such as Ebay, Redbubble and Trade Me, I have now watermarked this image. If you are interested in purchasing merch of this image you can head to my personal Redbubble store.
I’m not sure about the vignette that says “tasty” – I can’t at this point in time find out what the word was – so until the moment comes I just used creative license. So it’s not 100% accurate but I am pretty happy with the results!
longwhitekid 
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hi it was good to read a bit about eta.not much about eta at marrickville.i worked there from 1958 to 1962 as a van boy around sydney and a bit latter the south coast to wollongong,i really enjoyed working for eta then mid 1962 i received a DCM.cant buy eta products any more. barb a q sauce and margarine.i worked with a nice bunch of people iwould love to meet up with them. regards pete.
Peter I did another post on ETA a while back and I got to look into some of the Australian history. It is hard to find information on it. Eta had a history page up, then they took it down a while back. There is little to know about Sydney operations. I had a look on the site that usually has workplace groups, and all the ETA ones are for New Zealand factories – none for Australia, which is weird. So no help there. Thanks for your comment.
[…] from Easy Products, Cheeky Charlie (better known as Mr. Four Square), the Frosty Jack Eskimo, The ETA chicken, Handy Andy, Miss Mercer Metal, the Meadow Gold cow, Sergeant Dan, the Airborne Honey bee, the Tiki […]
I was considering buying some nz eta peanut butter and bringing it back to aus as I miss the eta taste, it tasted far better than the current choice available here these days, maybe it was because when you are a kid, everything tastes better.
Will they let you take sealed jars of commercial product through? I suppose so, as long as they are not opened…
It was a sad day when ETA nz stopped production of the nicest chicken chips ever created and replaced them with the nasty indian chicken curry flavour in the 80’s. I rang them up at the time and mentioned they had got the recipe wrong and they said they had lost the original recipe …….thanks for posting the chicken chips packet, happy days remembered
Thanks for your comment. They made these in Australia too, which I wasn’t aware of until recently. Not sure I remember curry chicken flavour.
For some time, from at least the 1930s to the 1950s and maybe longer, Eta (and presumably other manufacturers too) had to produce dual packaging, as their product couldn’t be called “peanut butter” in Queensland, South Australia or Western Australia. The dairy industry objected to the term “butter” so in those states it had to be “peanut paste”. It’s one of the regionalisms that turned up in the Macquarie Dictionary’s word map of Australia.
Interesting to find this out. Thanks for the information, Jan.