Wax-free poultry cases can help reduce disposal costs

US Foods offers more than 350,000 national, private label and brand items to more than 250,000 customers. One reason US Foods has become a nationwide foodservice distributor is the quality of its products. Behind it all, there's also the company's understanding of what it means to be sustainable.

Raeford

 "Sustainability is about ensuring that our company, products, services and partnerships make a credible, honest and robust contribution towards creating a sustainable economy," says Sylvia Wulf, svp, Center of the Plate, US Foods.

Across industries, the supply chain has become integral to the growth of a successful sustainability program. For US Foods, this translates not just into partnering with distributors that have enacted sustainable practices, but also into creating collaborations that extend those practices.

When House of Raeford, the country's eighth-largest poultry producer and a US Foods supplier, began working with Georgia-Pacific's Doraville plant using GP's Packaging Systems Optimization (PSO) program, it had a goal in mind to quantify its sustainability efforts. Georgia-Pacific's PSO program consists of a rigorous process, in which a team of packaging experts analyze a company's entire packaging supply chain to deliver a detailed report outlining opportunities for savings, profitability and sustainability.

For House of Raeford, the end result was eliminating more than 3,900 thirty-cubic yard dumpsters of non-recyclable boxes from the waste stream. Through the use of Georgia-Pacific's Greenshield wax replacement packaging, House of Raeford was able to offer a recyclable alternative to the wax curtain-coated boxes traditionally used in poultry applications. End-users saw no cost increase and benefitted significantly from reduced waste disposal expenditures.

"It's always been our intent to find sustainable packaging solutions for the benefit of our customers and to help them find the most cost-effective opportunities," says Rodney Garrison, House of Raeford's packaging manager.

US Foods also extended the Greenshield packaging into the Patuxent Farms private-label brand. The Patuxent Farms label delivers a range of proteins, including chicken, turkey, pork, beef, lamb and veal.
 

House of Raeford has expanded its use of Greenshield boxes. This change generated $690,421 in savings, greenhouse gas reduction calculated to be 24,329 tons of CO2, and total energy savings of nearly 3.351 million BTUs.

The relationship between US Foods, House of Raeford and Georgia-Pacific underscores how collaboration in innovation can produce tangible and sustainable results across the supply chain.