Convenience, sustainability trends addressed in new packaging material launch at AMI Expo

Professionals from the meat, poultry and seafood industries converged at Chicago's McCormick Place this morning for the American Meat Institute's 2011 AMI Intl Expo. At the show, they could find a variety of opportunities to learn more about trends and challenges facing the industries as well as packaging solutions that can optimize their operations.

One of the solutions launched at the show is the new Next Gen Boneless Beef Bag, BZ6620, with QuickRip Easy Open Technology from Sealed Air Cryovac. Earlier today, Packaging Digest spoke to Shawn Harris, director of fresh red meat, for Sealed Air's Cryovac Food Packaging, about the new offering and how it addresses two trends in food packaging-convenience and sustainability wins from protecting damage to fresh meat products.

Harris explained that the Next Gen Boneless Beef Bag offers better performance through improvements in resin technology. While he wasn't willing to go into details about the resin technology from the show floor, Harris did say the technology working in concert with improved manufacturing processes offer high performance with a lower carbon footprint. Most notably, fewer product pallets are used to ship the same number of bags. "We're able to put 15 percent more bags in each case," he remarked. This reduces the amount of corrugated and stretchwrap used in the process.

He argued that the big sustainability wins comes from the improved performance of the packaging material and the new opening feature, which can reduce product loss for meats. In the last five years since the United Nations' Food and Agriculture organization issued its report "Livestock's Long Shadow", there has been increasing awareness of the environmental impacts of meat production.

"You're putting all the energy in to produce the product and ship the product," Harris explained. "Without a good package, you can waste a lot of resources."

The new bags are made from a tough, abuse-resistant material with shrink properties engineered to result in a tight, wrinkle-free pack. The high-gloss and anti-haze properties of the package are formulated to accentuate the in-line, one-color print graphics and ensure a natural presentation with complete product visibility.

Harris also noted that the Next Gen Boneless Beef Bag performed very well during testing. "Before we launched this bag and this new formulation, we ran 2.5 million of these bags with our regional customers and we have seen that it has improved performance in their facilities as well as following it though destination-less leaks in packages when it gets to the final destination," he explained.

Additionally, the bag's QuickRip Easy Open feature, which appears at first blush to be primarily a convenience technology also enhances the packaged product's integrity and can reduce product loss due to cross contamination. 

"For food service and backroom grocery, the easy open technology increases employee safety, reduces their product loss and opportunities for cross-contamination," Harris commented. "We invited several meat market managers to our facility and asked them what they thought about this packaging compared to what we were doing before. They said, it was a homerun because it eliminates cross contamination whether product is in the same box or not." 

He went on to explain that these meat managers sometimes are opening multiple products with the same tool, so the knifeless opening not only reduced wear and tear on their tools it also eliminated any cross contamination from using these tools.

Harris noted that these features are helping the easy open technology get traction with food service and backroom groceries. "In North America, we're seeing more beef in knifeless, easy-open packaging," he observed. 

Noting that knifeless openings are not the only packaging features trending upwards packaging fresh meats, Harris added: "When you look at down at the front of the house, you'll see knifeless opening for consumers, cook-in type packaging, increased graphics and different ways of putting those graphics on the packaging."

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