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Reduced plastic, reduced costs: A win-win for food packaging
Billerud CrownBoard Craft® meets the challenge of removing single-use plastic from customer Kilcoy Global Foods’ Member’s Mark™ product packaging, successfully and at lower cost.
The Situation
Like most food manufacturers and packagers, Kilcoy Global Foods is looking for ways to improve the sustainability of the company’s packaging. Eliminating single-use plastic is a significant way to accomplish corporate sustainability goals.
The packaging for Kilcoy’s products, which are cooked and ready to eat, is prepared in a vacuum-sealed pouch using the sous vide method (cooked in hot water). After cooking, the pouch is placed in a plastic tray, slid into a paperboard sleeve and shrink-wrapped in polyolefin film to hold everything together and provide tamper resistance.
The Problem
The three-stage packaging process—tray, then sleeve, then shrink wrap—was expensive, wasteful and not sustainable. The imported trays, which consumer studies showed were seldom used for heating the meal, added a major cost that varied depending on seasonal and supply chain variables. At approximately 5 million trays per year, this item alone represented a significant part of the product’s overall packaging costs.
In addition, the sleeve-based assembly was difficult to merchandise because it did not stand upright well, tending to lean back or fall forward in the display, often resulting in a sloppy, disorganized retail display appearance.
Kilcoy saw these combined factors as an opportunity for improvement.
Initial solution—and more problems
The more sustainable solution was to place the food pouch directly into a paperboard box with glue sealing, eliminating the materials, production steps and costs, as well as the environmental impact, related to the plastic tray and polyolefin film.
Working with Midland, Kilcoy began their new packaging trials with a 24 pt. SBS (Solid Bleached Sulfate) paperboard. The problem? The product, cooked in hot water, retained much of the heat after vacuum sealing, which produced moisture inside the packaging. This moisture softened the sleeve packaging and made it vulnerable to damage from consumer handling during shopping.
During the testing phase, the packaging did not hold up well—it was often crushed by shoppers as they pulled the product from the shelf and returned it. It was quickly apparent, by the display appearance, this was not the right packaging solution for the brand.
The right solution: CrownBoard Craft from Billerud
After seeing the test results, Midland recommended 29.3 pt. CrownBoard Craft, a high-quality multi-ply Coated Unbleached Kraft board from Billerud.
The multi-coated top side ensures quality printability with a smooth, beautiful bright-white printing surface, while the brown reverse side contributes to excellent strength-to-weight characteristics and proven performance in applications similar to the Kilcoy product. As a result, the new packaging had the wet strength to withstand a high moisture situation while retaining its shape and merchandising appeal in a refrigerated cold chain environment.
The Billerud CrownBoard Craft solution performed flawlessly in testing, successfully protecting the product, standing up well to moisture and consumer handling and improving merchandising performance with more room for graphics and product information, as well as stacking neatly in display.
Corrugated display case: another benefit
CrownBoard Craft’s structural strength enabled Midland designers to make modifications in the product’s corrugated shipping/display case design and assembly process to reduce the material needed by 7% and eliminate gluing with a flat, unglued die cut.
Results: simpler, lighter, more sustainable packaging at lower cost
Billerud’s CrownBoard Craft solution successfully enabled the elimination of the imported plastic tray, resulting in a 98% reduction* in plastic consumption (and disposal) annually.
The new design allowed for a greater pallet density. The redesign allows for 33% more product per pallet. The weight per pallet went up, resulting in a 25% reduction in shipping cost savings per year. It also enabled more boxes to be placed on a pallet, which reduced transportation and restocking frequency, providing further overall savings for the customer.**
The Midland team believes that overall savings can be increased in the future with the lightweighting benefits of CrownBoard Craft—they are confident that the new package design could be effective in the 24.8 pt. weight with little or no adjustment.
The packaging process went from three steps to one, streamlining production and increasing process speed and throughput. The new approach also significantly reduced the number of SKUs of dry material stored on the factory floor—no more trays, no more polyolefin film.
Although the customer needed to purchase new automated cartoning equipment for the change, they calculated that the long-term savings in materials and process simplification would more than pay for the investment.
The 7% reduction in corrugated material requirements resulted in yet another significant reduction in material costs annually.
The power of paper, proven yet again
CrownBoard Craft is a proven, fully renewable, fully recyclable solution to reduce plastic packaging’s significant contribution to massive plastic production, consumption and waste worldwide—according to Statista, humans produce more than 350 million metric tons of plastic waste each year.1
The Kilcoy Global Foods story is just the latest of countless examples of how paper packaging is a win-win-win—less plastic, lighter weight, lower cost, more recycling—for packaged goods companies, consumers and the planet.
Why CrownBoard Craft?
- 100% virgin wood fiber for structure and strength in demanding heavy product, sturdy shelf-ready and hanging display applications like the Kilcoy product package
- Multiple-layer construction further enhances rigidity to withstand shipping and consumer handling
- Excellent strength-to-weight ratio enables lightweighting, delivering maximum strength with minimum weight
- Bright white, blue shade on the coated top side competes with top Coated Unbleached Kraft boards and provides a beautiful background for graphics and imagery
- Coated top side delivers brand-building print quality in solids and photography reproduction, critical in food packaging
- Fully blue-bin recyclable for environmentally conscious consumers
Content based on customer supplied data and testimonial.
*Measured in grammage comparing the reduction of plastic used across all Kilcoy food packaging using the newly adopted packaging versus the three-stage packaging process.
**Based on Kilcoy/Midland supplied data
1 “Plastic Waste Worldwide—Statistics & Facts,” Statista, January 10, 2024