Webinar case study #6 (eco-design trade-offs): Fleury-Michon’s wooden tub
On 20 June 2024, ALL4PACK EMBALLAGE PARIS organised a webinar on the trade-offs made by companies in response to the (sometimes contradictory) demands of eco-design. This is a highly topical issue, illustrated by a number of case studies that you can find throughout July on the show’s news pages. This week: Fleury Michon’s wooden tray, with Stéphane Merlet (packaging engineer at Fleury-Michon).
The right packaging
“Our mission is to reduce the environmental footprint of our products, especially those under development. To achieve this, we have defined what we call the ‘right packaging’, which not only meets this imperative, but also protects our products and preserves them for as long as possible, so that consumers can enjoy quality products.
Reducing plastic
“We still use a lot of plastic for our packaging today. 80% of our packaging is made of plastic because this material has undeniable properties: it’s light, water-resistant, inexpensive, a barrier to gas, etc. However, in 2019, we created a Packaging unit within the R&D department, whose main objective is to reduce the use of plastic (…) Now, it’s difficult to move towards a world with less plastic or even without plastic, we can’t go straight there, there are a lot of constraints and several red lines: regulations, of course, but also the health of our consumers and customer acceptance. “
The obstacles
“When this tray was launched in 2019, the first difficulty was the cost, because it’s a more expensive material. We also had the unpleasant surprise of having to pay a higher eco-contribution than for the plastic tray, because the tray was non-recyclable and non-compostable in the eyes of the regulations! (…) This required investment: to be able to package and market a ready meal in something other than plastic, it necessarily calls into question a huge number of elements in terms of organisation and structure. It has also been a real challenge to achieve a sufficiently long ‘use by’ date to be able to continue to market using the same process as for plastic trays, which has also meant that we have sometimes had to reduce batch sizes, which once again increases costs. (…) In the end, you can see that there are a lot of things that impact on the cost when you go from a plastic tray to a wooden tray in which the plastic is reduced by more than 80%”.
Change, not just in the tray!
“To ensure greater consumer acceptance, i.e. to get them to agree to pay a little more for a ready meal, we also had to present a better-quality meal. So we took advantage of the switch to wooden trays to offer a product with improved organoleptic qualities. To cut a long story short – I’m a packaging specialist, not a product specialist – let’s just say that it’s a product that closely resembles a ‘home-made’ product, except that it’s simply packaged using industrial processes. But in terms of preparation, it’s very, very close to ‘home-made'”.
Watch the replay of webinar #6 on 20 June 2024 (from 13′ to 27′).
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