I think you have nailed it with the name "actual packages" even though some other ideas have been offered. Also think staying with high quality photos is the way to go so if they can only be obtained with pictures of the actual product, then so be it. Quite surprised it has taken 10 years to find some of these boxes, I had always thought this stuff was squirrled away somewhere. I bet each company has the images in their archives. Reaching the person(curator) who has them and convincing them to send you images would prove difficult. I suspect you only want to use products in your collection and not even high quality images from company archives anyway, correct?
Yeah, I like "Actual Packages" the most, too. :-)
I've dealt with many companies over the years, and in only a few rare cases do companies have archives of their product packaging. General Mills is one of the exceptions - they've kept amazing records and have files of most of their cereal boxes and other products. Their archive is truly a museum. But on the other hand....lets see...
Nestle: They've had to reference my site a number of times to answer consumer questions about their own products. They have virtually nothing in regard to their past product information, let alone actual packaging .
Wrigley: I interviewed and worked with the longtime head of marketing and product managers/graphic designers when I researched my history of Big League Chew. The only thing in Wrigley's files were a few trade flyers and it took a while for those to be found. Months into the process, a former graphic designer found two sets of photos on an old hard drive (ten images in total) of old packaging from the late 80's and early 90's. Even the inventors/creators of the brand had nothing - no one involved saved anything. Currently, my personal Big League Chew packaging archive serves as the sole reference material for current PR/media instances where the old packaging is needed.
Lifesavers: When they celebrated their 100th Anniversary and created a special celebration box for it, they had to use my Gummi Savers wrapper scan to represent the launch of that product.
Then there are the acquisition losses. So many companies now are a conglomeration of other companies. For instance: Milk Duds for 80 years were produced by the Holloway company. That company merged with Clark and was eventually sold to Leaf and then Hershey. I've spoken to the Hershey Archives many times, and with regard to the Milk Duds brand, they have NOTHING from before 1986. For anything before that, they have to come to me. The sad reality is that as companies merge or are bought out or file chapter 11 or 13, if archives happen to have been kept up to that point, they are the first thing to get tossed in the trash.
One of the saddest phone conversations I had was with the executive who developed the Bubble Yum brand in the early 1970's. We spoke at length about how it all came to be. When I asked if he still had any of those old materials/samples he responded that he "carted them with him for 35 years, but finally threw them out just two years ago". My heart sank to the floor because that unique bit of history had disappeared into a landfill and I had only missed it by two years.
So the reality is that this material is not, in fact, "squirreled away" as lovely as that idea is. In most cases, it is in serious danger of being lost to history. And more and more is lost all the time.
And as much material as I've found and uncovered over the years, there is so much that has yet to be found, and that may never be.
That's why it's been fun for me to do this, and when I get to do things like publish the "only known images of Willy Wonka's Nerds Hot and Cool flavor box" -- that's pretty fun. That product is from 1989, and until I published those images, the only references to the product online at all were hazy recollections referring to them as "Hot and Cold Nerds". 1989 wasn't that long ago. But I currently have the only known box for that.
Speaking of nerds... I think I have just definitively proved how much of one I am.
