CHICAGO — While food manufacturers are increasing investment in sustainable packaging, implementing and scaling this technology remains difficult.

Conagra Brands, whose portfolio includes Hunt’s, Orville Redenbacher, Marie Callender’s and more, shared its own sustainable packaging journey and what it takes to make going green successful during a session at Pack Expo, held Oct. 18-21 in Chicago.

Christine Daugherty, vice president of sustainability for the Chicago-based company, emphasized that sustainable solutions must still satisfy packaging’s critical functions — protecting food, maintaining shelf life, running reliably on equipment, standing out on shelf, etc. — to be successful.

“Sustainability is added to this list, never traded against it,” she said.

Every change in packaging must solve four tensions, she noted: product protection, operational feasibility, material and logistics, and external expectations, including regulations such as extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws. Daugherty noted this final tension has nearly become bigger than the other three.

“If you’re not addressing some of the challenges that states are imposing, you’re paying fees, and most companies don’t like to do that,” she said.

Conagra aimed for 100% of its packaging materials by volume to be renewable by 2025 but came up short, hitting 93% in fiscal 2024. Daugherty said this largely was due to packaging regulations and definitions changing beneath them, including once voluntary EPR programs becoming law and stricter requirements around material recovery and disclosures.

“If you’re not tight with the numbers, how you’re reporting them, there can be challenges from a legal aspect,” she warned.

Amidst tightening regulations, Conagra is operating under a three-part sustainability framework: reduce virgin plastic use, design packaging for recyclability and support end-of-life packaging infrastructure. The company is eliminating materials and lightweighting where it can, avoiding materials that impede recovery, and supporting collection and sorting capacity, Daugherty said.

epub_1020-Conagra_800x800_q72_webp_jpg.jpgSource: Sosland Publishing Co.
“We’ve all probably been frustrated with lightweighted packaging, bottles and other things that are just not quite as sturdy as they used to be,” she acknowledged. “But it’s a way that we can reduce that virgin plastic component.”

To ensure a sustainable solution will be successful at scale, Conagra brings together a cross-functional team to evaluate it, including engineering, operations, R&D, food safety and design. The company will then stress test the package on the production line, including with its most difficult stock-keeping units.

“Test, test, test, test,” she said. “I know that sounds painful, but the last thing you want from your company is to come up with this beautiful package, and then your food safety person says nope, your operation person says nope and your engineer that is running the packaging equipment says absolutely no.”

Only once a solution has proven it can run at scale while satisfying quality, safety and economic metrics will it be greenlit.

“Is it easy? No. Is it fast? Absolutely not,” she said. “But it’s much better to be able to say we’ve done all these things, and that once we have that product out there on the shelf for the consumer, it has met all our criteria.”

Daugherty offered an example of a sustainable innovation from Conagra that passed these criteria: its Evol and Gardein brand-pressed paper bowls. Conagra reduced paper material use by 31% per bowl, saving 126,000 lbs of paper annually.

“We were able to reduce the thickness and maintain product integrity,” she said. “We saved quite a bit on paper. We saved on transportation and packaging. This is an example of working with our partners, internal and external. We were really happy with the outcome of this.”

Source https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/31227-conagra-sheds-light-on-sustainable-packaging-journey