It’s the first thing consumers notice about your brand, so visual impact is needs to be high. At the same time, environmental concern is driving demand for more sustainable packaging which brings a new set of challenges.
Here scientists David Wright, Aurelia Laluc and Courtney Knipe tell us why getting food packaging right can enhance your product and how their expertise can make upgrading your products packaging smooth sailing.
Packaging has various functions. One of those functions is to contain product and actually keep that product from being damaged. There are also other reasons such as looking to enhance your shelf life or you're looking for a new solution for that great new product that you've just come up with.
The packaging is as important to the product as the product itself. It's a question of having the right packaging for your product. One of the many reasons to change your packaging might be to improve the sustainability. A lot of end consumers now are looking for more recyclable products they're also looking to reduce their own personal waste. It's become a very hot topic. A lot of Manufacturers are working together and committing together to have sustainable packaging.
There is no single solution, it's all about finding a balance between the environmental sustainability, the manufacturability and a good customer experience Are we going to recycle? Are we going to go for compostable material material that breaks down? It's a balance of shelf life against afterlife.
Changing your product to something slightly more sustainable means you'll have to look at the manufacturability of your material. So you need to be sustainable but it needs to be able to keep the shelf life as well If you don't package properly then it's just as bad as over packaging.
You want to look at all the parts of your supply chain and also you want to look at your end use to ensure that even if you are switching to something recyclable that is going to match the consumer expectation on the other side. We're not developers of packaging, we're not manufacturers, we're here to show the packaging solution is fit for purpose.
We have a wide range of capabilities. There's packaging properties we can there's the food itself, we can do some more formulation. We've got everything from imaging the smallest thing on a high resolution electron microscope. We can measure detect substances at really low levels. We have a long list of properties that we can test that goes all the way from permeation, where we're testing the barrier properties with water and oxygen, so you're also looking at testing the secondary outer cardboard packaging that ensures that your product gets all the way to the shelf intact so you don't want to end up with that packet of crisps that's completely flat and crumpled on the bottom. We'll match the requirements of your product to the requirements for your packaging so you will have a holistic solution.
If you are thinking about replacing your standard packaging with more sustainable packaging we can show you that the properties are going to be the same and it's not going to have an impact on the packaging itself and on the product inside so ultimately we can find that sweet point of sustainability the right packaging and the best quality product.