The chilled win factor

As someone who used to look after food packaging for retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S), Helene Roberts knows a thing or two about the contents of the chiller cabinet, whether pizzas or piri piri houmous, tilapia or tabouleh.

Roberts, who for the past couple of years has been Sealed Air Cryovac’s retail director for Europe, highlights shelflife extension as one of the key priorities for retailers and the entire value chain. “They’re all looking for more shelflife, but they don’t necessarily want to ‘give’ those extra days to the consumer,” she says. “It can help to flatten out the shopping peaks during the week for a retailer, and that’s especially true for higher-value products such as meat.”

VP marketing and innovation at Linpac Packaging Jo Stephenson points to more immediate reasons why shelflife is staying high on the retail agenda. “With the recession – shoppers spending what they have in their hand on food for that day rather than on multibuy offers – and with the focus on food waste, we’re seeing far more interest from retailers in shelflife extension, especially as a way of providing more flexibility in the supply chain,” she says.

Short expectations

Chilled and fresh foods are a major battleground here, where a push of a few days in the life of a product can have a major impact on instore logistics and overall cost-effectiveness. But how is any such increase achieved? And how do you weigh these benefits against consumer perceptions, environmental considerations and other factors?

At RPC Bebo UK, the RPC group’s thermoforming business, general manager David Baker agrees that the UK ‘fresh chilled’ category remains almost synonymous with short shelflife. “We’ve got this love of chilled,” he says. “Chilled equals fresh, so chilled equals ‘good’. We expect the products to have short shelflife, too. Where there’s a longer shelflife, we don’t necessarily trust it.”

He contrasts this situation with France. “There, dips and olives, for example, are still predominantly in longer-shelflife, ambient packaging,” he says. “Of course, there are dips in glass in the UK, with a longer shelflife. But the fresh alternative – as in the case of olives, for instance – is a much bigger business.”

For this reason, he suggests, it is likely that continental retailers will, in the longer-term, follow the example of their UK counterparts in expanding their chilled offering.

Material distinction

Typically, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) dominates this fresh, chilled area in the UK, spanning houmous and other dips, prepared salads (including couscous, coleslaw, and so on) and other food-to-go. “It’s 90% or even 95% PET today, whereas five or six years ago, the same proportion was in polypropylene (PP),” says Baker.

In this and other categories, PET growth has partly been driven by the polymer’s clarity and overall aesthetics, and in part by consumer (and hence, retailer) concerns about the environment. Growth in bottle collection and recycling across Europe means greater availability of post-consumer recycled PET (rPET). Baker puts it succinctly: “You get clear, high-gloss PET and you get a big green tick next to it, too.”

Up until a few years ago, European fresh meat aisles demonstrated a fairly rigid category language in packaging terms. Cost-conscious German discounters opted for lower-barrier PP trays across red meat and poultry, the UK differentiated between PP for poultry and PET for red meat, while other continental markets such as the Benelux countries opted more squarely for PET.

The prevailing wisdom was that, in a category so solidly dominated by own-label product, there was little incentive for retailers to innovate. But more recently, shifting perceptions of PET – and wider availability of rPET – have had some impact in northern Europe.

At Sharpak’s Bridgwater site in the UK, which specialises in PET trays, sales director Nick James highlights the example of the primary – or mid-range – poultry line from retailer Tesco, which has gone into PET trays. The main driver here appears to be tiering, or segmentation, and the use of packaging to underscore value, standard and premium ranges – increasingly prevalent across many retail own-label categories.

Packaging weight reduction is the other environmental pressure point in markets such as the UK, again driven by the consumer and retailers, but also increasingly by voluntary undertakings such as the Courtauld Commitment.

“You can lightweight a tray, but there’s a limit to this,” says James. “And as an industry, we’re very close to reaching that limit.”

Across the store, converters can point to examples of retailers demanding first weight reduction – or a shift to a completely different format – and then explanations, when the same pack fails in the supply chain.

Airtight case?

These pressures help to explain the growing interest in vacuum skinpack options for protein. Not only does the form-fill-seal version of skinpackaging create lighter packs, thermoformed inline, but both this and the variant where the ‘skin’ is sealed to a preformed tray offer longer shelflife. This is certainly true in comparison with meat and poultry inside a traditionally-sealed, modified atmosphere (MAP) tray.

Roberts at Sealed Air picks up James’s point about tiering, and underlines the role that skinpackaging has played here for several UK retailers. “Chains such as Sainsbury’s, the Co-Op and Waitrose use the packaging to emphasise ‘good, better, best’ tiering, staying with tray-and-lid combinations for their core range, while using skinpacks for premium, aged steaks, for instance,” she says.

Suppliers of trays to the meat and poultry industry tread a fine line between, on the one hand, demonstrating a willingness to work on tray-and-skinpack combinations with other suppliers and, on the other, minimising the significance of the overall trend.

At Sharpak, James argues in favour of the tray-and-skin version. “The tray is more stable and sits better, offering the advantages of both the skin film’s functionality and the rigid tray’s presentation,” he says.

Linpac’s Stephenson admits that the extended shelflife from skinpacks (typically, four extra days) throws down a real challenge to the traditional MAP tray format. But, she asks, does the consumer appreciate this? “Interestingly, our own research with consumers suggests that it is not particularly well-received. Consumers tend not to like that look.” It may keep food fresher for longer but, she argues, if this alone were a winning formula for British consumers, then UHT milk would dominate, for example, the dairy category.

Quite apart from the aesthetics of shiny film stretched tight over product, Linpac points to the knock-on effects of excluding oxygen. “The colour may deteriorate, and consumers can think the meat is off, even when it isn’t,” says Stephenson.

Roberts at Sealed Air argues that these issues can be addressed – as, she claims, M&S addressed them – by “talking about them” to consumers.

Nonetheless, there are examples elsewhere in Europe, Linpac’s Stephenson states, of retailers moving meat and poultry into skinpacks, and later moving out of them again. At the other end of the spectrum, some tray suppliers have at least discussed the scenario that skinpackaging could start to take even larger bites out of their protein markets.

Continued segmentation

Reassurance comes from an unlikely source. Roberts at Sealed Air reasons that the current drive to differentiate and tier ranges is stronger than the benefits of any one material. “Both pack types co-exist, and which you use depends on what you want to achieve,” she says. “You’re probably always going to have segmentation, and you need the packaging to help to achieve that.”

She draws a parallel with chilled ready meals, where core ranges in the UK still tend to use crystalline PET (CPET) trays, while at the premium end of the market you find semi-prepared meals and the use of smoothwall aluminium as a differentiator.

Over in another chilled aisle, the fresh pizza segment might not spring to mind as a hotbed of packaging activity. In the UK, Roberts admits, the shelflife of fresh pizzas rarely goes over 10 days, partly because sauce recipes tend to be different, and partly because of health & safety precedents.

But pizza is usually a very stable product, she says, and in other parts of Europe, Sealed Air’s BDF high-barrier film is giving up to 20 days shelflife “depending on specific toppings and dressings”. The film can, literally, give the retailer this greater time flexibility, says Roberts, effectively doubling product life in comparison with standard films. Or, with pizzas following other chilled foods into tiered offerings, it can be used to serve up either a fresher pizza or a ‘cleaner’ recipe, with fewer additives.

Even the often-overlooked pizza disc is undergoing something of a makeover. Linpac reports that its new range of foamed polystyrene discs offers new options in shaping, flanges, and so on, but also means that more information can be presented more clearly. Again, this contributes towards segmentation in a growing market.

Chain reaction

Of course, packaging innovation is not always the answer. As RPC’s Baker emphasises, retailer interest in additional shelflife is a fact of life in chilled prepared foods and food-to-go. But how that feeds through into packaging specifications in this particular category is less clear.

It is more likely, he says, that for fresh, short-shelflife products, the choice of an uncomplicated, monolayer pack remains unchanged. Instead, the food manufacturer may aim to gain the retailer valuable hours – or even days – through fine-tuning of the supply chain.

“The cleaner your filling, the more you use gas flushing and shorten the supply chain, the more of a shelflife benefit you can offer,” says Baker. “If you fill today and can get product into store the day after tomorrow, that’s obviously better than in three days’ time. It’s also about maintaining an effective chill chain, of course.”

Technical wizardry from packaging suppliers is not the solution to every challenge, it seems.