At the heart of most of what we do are little moments of joy. Products that are joyous to buy, joyous to cook with, to eat and of course joyous to share with friends and family. Underpinning all of this is the excitement of finding ways that we can truly eat our way to a better planet.
To that end we feel pretty strongly about how we package our delicious, nutritious products and the role our packaging has to play in supporting positive environmental outcomes.
To help us make well informed decisions on the best type of packaging, we brought in the experts and applied three different but complementary approaches to quantifying and analysing the environmental impacts of the packaging alternatives available. These were
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) – this allowed Food Nation to quantify the environmental impacts of different materials within a variety of scenarios.
- Circular economy review – We have reviewed the state of our waste management systems in New Zealand to determine what materials now and in the future are more likely to be reused and less likely to enter landfill or leak into the environment.
- Triple Bottom Line analysis – The packaging we select can impact the product that is contained within it. We must ensure that the material does not compromise the safety and life of the product while still being economical and convenient for consumers.
Hitting the new shelves soon will be the outcome of this work – our new packaging.
All the Happy Patties, Magic Minces, Amaze Balls and our new Super Sausies will be standing tall in their fine new rPET trays made from largely recycled PET made and easily recyclable right here in NZ. They will still be sleeved in their cardboard sleeves with lots of useful information and recipes. These sleeves use vegetable based inks and no laminates so they are also easily recycled.
The easy peel film on top still needs to go into the soft plastics recycling scheme but hopefully we will soon find PET film we can also use – we are on the hunt!
Available materials and waste management systems are evolving fast in NZ so we will keep watching this but for now we hope it brings you joy knowing the product you have chosen is good for you, good for the planet and a joy to eat.
