Improving the Shelf Life of Fresh Fruits and Vegetables (Part 02)

The first part of this article described some innovations in fresh vegetables packaging. Before we go to the section of fresh fruits packaging, two more vegetables innovations. A simple but effective tracking-and-tracing system, which by the way could also be used for fruits, introduced by Tanimura & Antle Fresh Foods Inc. There after I have to describe the “green wok asparagus”, although little is known about it and then we go to fresh fruit: The Grãpple, NGP’s plastic packaging range and Sirane’s absorbent pad both for soft fruit. We end with the new ventilating SPS punnet for crystal clear product visibility and the 6-pack for berries from Driscoll’s of Europe.

Tracking-and-Tracing with KwikTrak’r packaging closure
The KwikTrak’r provides a re-sealable closure, keeping each lettuce head crisp, fresh and protected. Interestingly Tanimura & Antle also introduced with this closure a fresh produce traceability. Each KwikTrak’r clip, used for iceberg lettuce, is printed with the Ranch Number, Field Location, Work Number and Pack Date, so that the consumer (theoretically) can know exactly where the iceberg lettuce has come from. But who is familiar with the codes used by Tanimura & Antle?
This innovative food safety development is a promising step forwards, but misses the code explanation (not even available on T&A’s website). Some homework still has to be done.

Improving the Shelf Life of Fresh-Cut Fruits and Vegetables

According to information from the AMI (agricultural market information service) in Bonn/Germany, the world produces nearly 1.5 billion tonnes of fruit and vegetables, of which 800 million tonnes vegetables and nearly 700 million tonnes fruits.
Fruit and vegetable production levels have increased steadily over the past few years. Apples, grapes, oranges, melons and bananas are the world’s leading fruit varieties, accounting for around 60% of the global production. The range of vegetables is more diverse with the three leading varieties (tomatoes, head cabbage, cucumbers) accounting for only 30% of the total production volume. More than 10% of the global production of major fruit varieties are traded cross-border. For fresh vegetables, this figure is only 3% to 4%. The EU is the world’s largest importing region for fresh fruit and, if trade between the EU member states is taken into account, for fresh vegetables as well. Otherwise, the EU ranks second to the USA as an importer of fresh vegetables.

The importance of the fresh produce market segment showed this week when Berlin was all set for the international fresh produce sector’s premier event of the year, the “Fruit Logistica”, the leading international meeting place of the fresh produce trade, which assembled some 2,300 exhibiting companies and 55,000 professional visitors from across the entire fresh produce chain, including global players as well as small and medium-sized suppliers from all around the world.

Fruit and vegetables play an important role in healthy nutrition and are high on the list of consumer priorities. However the major obstacle of purchasing ready-to-eat fresh-cut fruits and vegetables is their short shelf life, leading to quick degeneration and decomposition of the product and undesirable look and negative palatability.
Fruit and vegetables are living products undergoing a ripening and at the end an ageing process, in which the plant tissue is broken down. The products undergo various biological processes, which also continue after the products have been harvested. The processes cause gradual changes in the quality.

Wine in a Ready-to-Drink Glass

Attracting new consumers is crucial for winemakers, as consumption has been declining in most mature markets. And so the ubiquitous 750-milliliter glass wine bottle has gotten competition from new types of packaging primarily intended to make wine more accessible to new consumer groups and to extend drinking occasions.

Following the success of bag-in-box formats and innovative initiatives that range from pouches to mini barrels, wine in an aluminium can has surfaced as a potential means from which to escape the rising cost of glass bottles, while at the same time increasing one’s green credentials.

But whatever the high-sophisticated printing and quality of graphics you can’t deny that wine in a can or even a can-bottle gives you the feeling of consuming a cheap wine, an ordinary table-wine.
So what are you supposed to do when you bought yourself a nicely presented upscale ready-meal to be supposed to be eaten from a china plate, as described in my previous post. Let’s be honest you can’t seriously accompany that with wine in a can, whatever the brand-name printed on the side.

The prestigious French Château Roubine comes up with the perfect answer.
Château Roubine’s Grand Cru Classé Côtes de Provence has gone on sale in the UK in foil-sealed 175ml single serve ready-to-drink PET-glasses manufactured by 1/4 Vin in France, providing a similar appreciation of the wine flavour as with a classical glass. The shape of the PET-glass was designed especially for Chateau Roubine with personalised marking.

Both red and white wines of the Classique Chateau Roubine are currently available in ‘One Glass Wine’ PET ‘glasses’ at the Sketch Pierre Gagnaire pop-up café at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. UK agent Eminent Wines is also looking to place them in other outlets, for example, high end lunch boxes, airport and train lounges etc.

The concept is based upon the use of a heat-sealing aluminium compound to seal the specially treated glasses in a low-pressure. The head space prevents the opening and drinking phases from any drip. This head space is inert and contains an average rate of residual oxygen lower than 0.8% (1% maxi). The wine is therefore not facing any oxidation.
The depression effect results in a concave lid. The characteristic ‘pop’ noise made by air entering the glass ensures the product quality.

The product is totally airtight and protected from the outside environment. The thermo sealing process preserves the flavours in the wine for many months and maintains the roundness and elegance of the tannins. The seal is easy to peel and leaves a clean lip (rim). Being lightweight and 100% recyclable the One Glass Wine also contributes to the environment.

OneGlassWine is a technology for packaging wine in a ready-to-drink glass. It guarantees the conservation of the original organoleptic properties of the wine, on the flavour side as well as on the taste side. The wine is kept under inert gas between its initial container and the final packaging, almost free of air. This process ensures an amount of dissolved oxygen lower than 0.5mg/litre. OneGlassWine requires no additive nor preservative and no specific work on the wine.
The wine is delivered ‘ready-to-use’ and does not suffer any transformation. It is packaged at room temperature. The inerting equipment is entirely patented.

1/4Vin is the inventor of the innovative and patented OneGlassWine technology, which uses heat sealing by conduction to assure a long-lasting, easy-to-remove seal of the lid. The glass does not leak and can be carried in a bag or a pocket safely. The technology is suitable for any still wine as well as for spirits and aperitifs.

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Eating Your Ready-to-Eat Dinner in Style

This is not a focus on ready-cooked fast-food, but on well-prepared, high-quality, nicely presented everyday (home-delivered) dinners and party dinners. A little bit different from the famous fish-and-chips wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. Your choice: Eating your ready-to-eat dinner directly from a plastic tray or off a proper china plate.

Cryovac’s Ovenable Foam Trays

Until now, ready-cooked meals have had a limited market because there has not been a good way of presenting them onto a china plate, let alone transfer them from the plastic transport tray to a china plate. Most people dislike eating directly from a plastic tray, they simply prefer to eat their dinner off a proper china plate.

The possibility to be able to eat the ready meal directly from one‘s own plate through a simple manoeuvre, makes way for a quality improvement in terms of the overall meal experience.

Disposable packs for convenience food (ready-to-eat meals) usually consist of a tray manufactured from cardboard, metal (mainly aluminium) or a plastic material with a thin, transparent plastic film which serves as a lid.

WalMart Brasil’s Next Step in the “Green World”

WalMart, one of the most controversial companies in the world, has set its next step in the world of sustainability and ‘greenness’. Well, in Brazil that is.
Amazing, as Brazil is one of the biggest polluters in the world, is infamous for its ‘big mouth’ and empty words in regard to its natural treasures (Amazon, Pantanal, Cerrado etc), its negligence of implementing selective waste collection systems and waste management and its unwillingness to draft and enforce laws to reduce the tremendous problems of landfills.

Within this typical Brazilian ‘Wild West’ environment, the sustainability step of WalMart Brasil, is, due to its company size and influence within the world of the Brazilian consumer products companies, not only laudable but of sheer incalculable consequences, as the other supermarket chains have to follow and the (international) consumer products companies involved can’t stop this trend anymore. Whether they like it or not, they have to set the next step and have to be followed by companies not yet involved.
WalMart Brasil dictates, and in this case that’s a good one.

Above I used the word ‘trend’ which reminds me of my promise to write about the forecasted trends for 2010. Well, without saying that I’ll not write about the other trends as well, this is probably one of the trends most to be seen in 2010. The 6R’s (rethink, redesign, reduce, reuse, refill, and recycle) will definitely dominate the packaging trends in 2010.

But let’s go back to WalMart Brasil’s End-to-End Sustainable Packaging Project.

Last week Walmart introduced 10 products of some of its main suppliers that were developed within the End-to-End Project: Sustainability Across Boundaries. In other words the results of the analysis of the life cycle of these products – from raw material to disposal – in regard to reduce their environmental impacts.

Aware of the complexity of putting sustainability in supply chains into practice, especially in a world with some 7,000 suppliers and 60,000 items in its stores, Walmart challenged nine business partners with well-known brands to participate in the project.
PepsiCo’s chocolate product Organic Toddy, Nestlé’s line of Pureza Vital waters, Unilever’s concentrated fabric softener Comfort, Johnson&Johnson’s Band-Aid,  Colgate-Palmolive’s disinfectant Pinho Sol, 3M’s bath sponge Ponjita Naturals Curauá, the Total Confort Pampers of Procter&Gamble, Coca-Cola Brasil’s Matte Leão Orgânico, Cargill’s line of vegetable oils with the brand name Liza, besides WalMart’s own brand of soap TopMax (manufactured by Bertolini).

Let’s have a look at the results. One by one. It just is a simple enumeration, but with regard to the results, fascinating to read.

Foldable dvd-case with Electroluminescent Animation

The nano-electronics research centre IMEC, the Hasselt University in Belgium and the Belgian screen printing company Artist Screen created a spin-off, called Lumoza NV. The new company develops and commercializes large area screen printed electronics for the advertising and packaging industry.

Lumoza’s technology for screen printed electronics combines electroluminescent ink with a driver that controls the sequence and timing of the animation. The result is an electroluminescent computer animation that can be printed, just like ink, on all kind of surfaces, for example on a thin plastic foil. And afterwards, folded, rolled up, bended or wrapped.

The material used is a combination of a phosphor-based inorganic material and an organic material. The exact composition is confidential, “but it is not OLED”, the company states.

With its light-emitting screen, Lumoza aims at applications in the advertising and packaging market. The screen comes with a driver chip that also stores the animation data and is typically powered by a micro-battery, depending on the size of the installation. In order to save valuable battery energy, the chip contains a capacitive switch that activates the display when a prospective customer is approaching and deactivates it when he is moving on.

The process currently achieves pixels at a size of 200 micron, which yields a resolution of 127 pixels per inch. The animation content needs to be stored on the attached chip for the applications.

Not surprisingly the dvd-packaging industry has already shown interest, as they are always looking for new appealing packaging alternatives. The result is that the first foldable dvd-packaging with an electroluminescent animation is on show.

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Developments in RFID – An Overview (Part 03)

I know RFID is not a glamorous item, (except that the results can be) but more importantly RFID is of overriding importance to the future developments in packaging and not only to the technology of it, but without doubt also to the future possibilities of design and waste management. So continue reading.

In the meantime we have reached the year 2009, in which RFID gets its extra dimension. Were the first pilot-projects of Wal-Mart and Metro, as described in part 01, concentrated around pallets and shipping cases, and later selectively implemented, due to the high prices of the tags, around up-scale consumer products, in 2009 RFID entered into mass production.

In the beginning companies had the choice between two modes of identification and information storage on the boxes in which their products were packaged: the manual application of RFID labels or the inline printing and application of the labels. The first procedure, known in the industry as the ‘Slap & Ship’ method, is labour intensive and can only handle relatively small volumes. The second approach, ‘Print & Apply’, involves the implementation of an infrastructure and requires major capital investments.

The Hide-Pack
The first ‘mass-introduction’ came from Krupack with the Hide-Pack, consisting of a RFID-inlay embedded within the structure of a corrugated case, or folding carton during box manufacturing. Sandwiched within the manufacturer’s glue joint and encapsulated in a dab of adhesive, the inlay becomes an integral part of the packaging. It’s also protected from moisture and cold storage, as well as from bumps along the supply chain.

The inlayed chip is not visible either inside or outside the box. For protection purposes, the tag is embedded in the manufacturing joint, as the joint offers the highest level of protection for the inlay, given it is the only area on the box’s circumference which has 2 layers of board over one another – and for RFID readability purposes – the corner of a box is typically a very desirable tag placement to ensure optimal read rates of the inlay once the box has been filled with product.

Another advantage of Krupack’s Hide-Pack is the ecological aspect. Numerous industry studies show that polymer laminated solid-metal antenna inlays – by far the most common type of inlay on the market – are completely removed by the recycling process from the old corrugated containerboard before the re-pulped material makes its way to the paper machine.

The Plastic Bottle Cap and the Beer Can
Also in 2009 two Japanese companies revealed the development of a plastic bottle cap embedded with a RFID-tag. According to reports, the development would allow cosmetic and beverage manufacturers to continue to use their existing manufacturing equipment even if they shift to the new cap.

Developments in RFID – An Overview (Part 02)

As I wrote in my previous post: Let’s walk through some of the most interesting developments of the last couple of years. In chronological order. Here we go.

The SmartCorq
In 2006 Lab-ID patented a system using artificial corks embedded with RFID inlays. The, so called, SmartCorq, allowed wine producers to provide their customers with greater assurance of the quality and provenance of each bottle of wine. The tag can be encoded with such wine data as bottling date, type of grape and alcohol percentage, along with other characteristics.

Once in the bottle, the cork’s tag can be read by wine producers to help them store and distribute their products. Distributors, retailers and consumers, meanwhile, can use the cork to determine specific details about each bottle of wine.
The read-write tags embedded into the corks use a Philips’ ISO 15693 I-Code SLI 13.56 MHz chip with 1,024 bits of memory.

The Smart Paper Tag
In Sept. 2006 the Hyogo Paper-Box & Corrugated-Box Industry Association in Japan, together with the University of Hyogo, Carton i Co.,Ltd., Technolinks KK and Yaka Paper Manufacturing Co., Ltd. introduced their jointly developed first smart paper tag in Japan. The tag consists of a 0.5mm-thick chip attached to paper that is 1x 5cm in size, using highly conductive ink containing silver functions as the antenna.

tagInLabel

Reportedly being the first smart tag in Japan to be fashioned in this way, it has a transmission range of around 80 cm, which developers aim to increase.
By using an antenna made of ink rather than metal, the tag can be recycled while still attached to the cardboard. In addition, the new tag is less costly to produce than conventional products.

Pharmaceutical Bottles
At the end of 2006 the health-care packaging division of Owens-Illinois (in these days Rexam) unveiled a plastic pharmaceuticals bottle with an RFID inlay embedded directly into the base of the container. The RFID-inlay is

Innovative and Prestigious – The “CEvolution Bottle”

photo: Dow Chemical

Trends in the packaging reflect society at large. Twenty years ago, the consumer products companies were running the show, high-speed lines, runnability of the packaging material, automated liners and practical and low-cost solutions were their priorities. Ten years ago, it was the consumer, started to rule the show by asking more detailed products information, more convenient and at the same time fancy packaging. Next came the consumer request for product differentiation, weight reduction, single-serve packages, and a clean natural approach. Today everybody is looking at how packaging affects the environment. Environmental issues have come to the forefront. Packaging is not any longer about design and function, it’s all about the management of the planet’s resources and the impact on the environment. And today’s consumers are not only aware of that, but are requiring from any company a proper implemented sustainability governance.

The choice of a responsible packaging solution is a good start. One of the possibilities to confront the environmental issues is the development of cartons made of paperboard from a renewable fibre-based resource, to replace fossil materials.

A report published by the Swedish Environmental Research Institute states that packaging based on wood fibre is the most environmentally friendly alternative. It is better than plastic, derived from oil. Better than glass, which is heavy and energy intensive from a life-cycle perspective. And better than aluminium, which is expensive to recycle and whose supply is questionable. Wood fibre comes from a renewable source, has a limited environmental impact and can be recycled up to seven times.

Rio Bailque – Amapá/Brazil – photo: Chico Terra

The other side of the coin is, that it takes a tree 70 years to grow to full height, which means that forestry – like any environmental work – is a long-term undertaking. However, a growing, healthy forest is in itself part of the solution to the carbon problem. The more it grows, the better it binds up carbon dioxide. A well-managed forestry operation is beneficial from an environmental point of view. Sustainably managed forests have to be certified according to FSC and PEFC standards.

Despite the sometimes high-tech printing technologies used to attract consumer’s attention, a paperboard packaging is often seen as a simple solution to the packaging problem, a simple wrapping of the product. And it’s not only the printing. 2010 is the beginning of the era of shapes, which will dominate packaging design, as rectangular packs don’t open doors, don’t attract consumers to buy the product. But unusual shapes place unusual demands on the elasticity of the paperboard.

One of the companies entering the ‘shape-era’ is Edelmann in Germany, positioning itself as one of the leading converters for luxury products in Europe. By using Korsnäs White 345 and 380 gsm, with its characteristics of bending stiffness, tearing resistance and elasticity, Edelmann was able to create the “CEvolution Bottle” collection for luxury alcoholic beverages. If you scale them down, these packs would be perfect for perfume bottles too.

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Developments in RFID – An Overview (Part 01)

The direct cause that did decide me to write an article about RFID, was the introduction of CypoPrint, the name BASF in Germany gave to a new range of metal-based inks destined for the production of flexible antennas for RFID tags. Reading that press-release I realized that it had been quite some time that I wrote about radio frequency identification (RFID) in relation to packaging.
It’s quite a story, so I have cut it in three posts.

HF RFID-tag

For my readers who are not familiar with RFID the following: RFID, the abbreviation for radio frequency identification, is a generic term that is used to describe a system that transmits the identity (in the form of a unique serial number) of an object wirelessly, using radio waves. It’s grouped under the broad category of automatic identification technologies.

Auto-ID technologies include bar codes, optical character readers and some biometric technologies. They are used to reduce the amount of time and labour needed to input data manually and to improve data accuracy. In contrast to bar code systems, which often require a person to manually scan a label or tag to capture the data, RFID is designed to enable (handheld or stationary) readers to capture data on tags and transmit it to a computer system without needing a person to be involved.

A typical RFID tag consists of a microchip attached to a radio antenna mounted on a substrate. The chip can store as much as 2 kilobytes of data. For example, information about a product or shipment – date of manufacture, destination and sell-by date.

To retrieve the data stored on an RFID-tag, you need a reader. A typical reader is a device that has one or more antennas that emit radio waves and receive signals back from the tag. The reader then passes the information in digital form to a computer system.