Poverty, economic inequality and water contamination can lead to the inability to produce sufficient amounts of food to sustain a population. According to projections from the United Nations, the world’s population could reach well over nine billion people by 2050, who will all need to be fed. How can packaging help solve this crisis?
Frances Butler takes a closer look at the main challenges around food availability and how sustainable food packaging can enable food security (and therefore extend availability).
In 2020, “between 720 and 811 million people faced hunger” according to the 2021 Food Security and Nutrition report from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. The prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity has apparently been on the rise since 2014, but the estimated increase in 2020 was “equal to that of the previous five years combined”. The report also said that around 660 million people may still face hunger in 2030, partly due to the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on global food security.
What are some of the main challenges when it comes to food security, and what needs to be done to change this?
In an interview with Tetra Pak, executive director of the Global Child Nutrition Foundation, Arlene Mitchell, said:
“The main issue is not the lack of food – it’s more about getting food to where it’s needed when its needed. Here, packaging clearly plays a crucial role in securing safe and nutritious food for the global population by providing efficient, transportable and safe packaging solutions.”
She also mentioned the inadequate processing and packaging solutions in low-income countries which result in significant food waste, due to post-harvest losses in production and transport, suggesting solutions should be developed specifically for these countries.
Mitchell highlighted the impact of the pandemic in revealing “the need for resilient back-up solutions” in our food systems that can be quickly implemented in the event of crises, as well as developing local systems closer to the consumer and systems for transporting food over long distances with longer shelf-life packaging. She concluded that public trust needs to be built alongside consumer understanding of food systems, safety, quality and nutrition.
In the event of a crisis such as the pandemic, how could ‘sustainable’ food packaging enable food security? Finnish food packaging company Huhtamaki outlined its belief that this can happen:
“The longer its shelf life, the more value food has in times of crisis. Packaging is an important part of that, extending the shelf life and therefore the availability and affordability of food.”
The company added that a “frequently misunderstood” feature of packaging (especially lightweight flexible packaging) is its “ease of scalability”, claiming it can be easily adapted to match the size and requirements of the product it protects.
The article states smaller portions and portioned packaging can reduce food waste through storing in discrete lots or sections, where the spread of mould and bacteria is restricted, and can be especially beneficial in keeping populations supplied with the necessary food and provisions that require protection, so they can be consumed over time.
Back in 2021 we spoke to Helén Williams, associate professor for environmental and energy systems at Sweden’s Karlstad University, on the subject of packaging, food waste and the consumer. More recently, we asked her about the main challenges to food availability and the importance of including food waste by consumers and households in lifecycle assessments.
According to Williams, one of the main challenges when it comes to food availability is making sure more of the food produced is consumed for human needs. During the interview, she gave the example of the current situation in Sweden, where the potato crop had been affected by recent rain, and as a result a lack of potatoes was predicted for this winter and the following spring. Williams says that packaging can help with this by protecting valuable food until consumption.
She also highlighted how the use of food packaging varies across different countries, stating: “in poorer countries where the infrastructure and facilities for prolonging shelf-life may not exist, the cooling, transportation and protection of food is more important. In rich countries where most of the food is wasted in restaurants, by consumers and in households, we need to focus on how much food we should offer.”
When it comes to improving existing materials and systems, Williams says it becomes a case of analyzing how to reduce a product’s environmental impact, such as using less material, identifying the right material to use and ensuring that more of the material being put on the market is collected, sorted and recycled.
She also explained the concept of the ‘service of packaging’ which is used in the university’s research, defining it as what packaging provides, such as ease of handling the product.
Williams emphasized:
“What governments and the policy makers need to understand and improve, as well as companies, is that when we develop packaging for the future, how do we optimise the service that packaging provides, and what do we need?”
When Williams’ previously spoke to us for the Packaging Europe podcast, she stated that the impact of food waste by consumers and households needed to be considered in Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs). We asked how including this information can help to reduce food waste and improve food availability.
“In LCA, what functional unit you’re using is always important. When you use a functional unit to look at how much impact there is from the production of the product, you get one value - but if you increase it to look at the impact of the consumed food, the impact of the wasted food will then be part of the life cycle assessment – if you have the consumed food in focus,” Williams explains.
She adds that if we always prioritize production and forget to include consumption, “you see it’s environmentally good to have large packaging, because you divide the amount of packaging material for a larger amount of food.” However, she says that when household food waste is included - for example, if consumers waste about 20% of a product - it would be better environmentally to produce a smaller one, even if that means using a little more packaging material, “as in the total analysis we make a reduction of climate or environmental impact.”
One area to be careful of is food items with a lower climate impact such as fruit and vegetables, Williams says, as this includes products where “the impact of the packaging equals the impact of the vegetable, since it has such a low climate impact,” or products where the packaging has a higher impact than the food itself.
In these cases, she says, “you need to decide: should we use this packaging for this product, or is it better to waste some, because the packaging itself has a higher climate impact than the product?”
Williams gave the example of taco sauce in a glass jar, where the glass jar has a high climate impact and taco sauce (due to being mainly tomatoes) has less climate impact. She states that if she was a taco producer, she would think:
“Do I really need the glass jar, because it has a higher climate impact than our sauce – or can we do something differently to reduce the impact of the packaging?”
In the podcast, Williams also mentioned the importance of packaging sizing and the potential for producers to provide multiple sizes for different households, as apparently the university’s research found consumers often buy more food than they have time to consume, due to the packaging itself being too big.
When it comes to implementing more diverse sizes at scale, she explains that some packaging machines can be adjusted to make multiple sizes, and in some cases it might mean a new packaging machine, which might be too expensive.
“Today, the consumer that chooses a smaller pack pays – in my opinion – too high a price per kilo,” Williams says, adding that when focusing on food reduction we need to make sure the food being produced is valuable and not wasted, and this is an area where businesses can contribute by understanding consumer’s needs and providing different sizes.
Speaking about the impact of implementing different sizes at scale, Williams believes increasing regional distribution is key, as it would allow some products to be produced in different areas.
She gave the example of many consumers feeling annoyed about the plastic packaging on cucumbers. “If you have a system where the cucumbers come from a local or regional area with a short transport distance and you can buy it the day after harvest, you might not need to package it in plastic anymore. If takes one or two days to get there and then it’s in a central storage facility for the retailers, then we need the plastic on the cucumber, otherwise we waste too much.”
She concluded by drawing attention to the flexibility of context - where is packaging being used and what does the system look like? Williams predicts that alongside general solutions, the future will see more investigation into specific products, taking their context into consideration.
Looking ahead: how could active and intelligent packaging help to address food supply shortages?
In August 2022, the Asia Pacific Food Industry published an article on how Active and Intelligent Packaging (A&IP) addresses food supply shortages, stating the data collected by smart packaging can help stop potential contamination problems before they start, keep the food supply chain flowing and that Asia-Pacific food suppliers are under a lot of pressure due to rising demand, supply chain backlogs, and sustainability initiatives. However, innovations like hygienic packaging (including anti-microbial materials and tamper-evident packaging) and fresh produce packages outfitted with temperature sensors can help.
Research into time temperature indicators (TTI) and testing has been carried out by meal-kit company HelloFresh and AIPIA (Active and Intelligent Packaging Association) members Keep-it, Zebra Technologies and Wageningen University, in an effort to reduce food waste.
Alongside this, Cleantech and Beyond was a finalist in last year’s Sustainability Awards with its Digital Temperature Indicator (DTI) which it says can be used in smart packaging from manufacturing through to storage and usage by end users, with the temperature monitored manually and wirelessly through RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and NFC (Near Field Communication).
When it comes to food availability, suggestions to increase shelf life, consider food waste in LCAs and provide multiple sizes of packaging for food have been made, and steps taken such as including TTIs and DTIs in packaging to combat food shortages and increase availability. However, several avenues are still being tested, the outcomes of which remain to be seen. We look forward to seeing more exploration and development in this area.
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