Plant-based spread maker tries move into paper-based tubs

The Dutch food company behind the Flora, Becel and ProActiv brands will begin to roll out paper-based tubs across all of its plant-based spreads this year, as consumer goods makers come under pressure over single-use plastic. 

The KKR-owned Upfield food business, bought from Unilever for €6.8bn in 2018, has developed the tubs made from paper fibre to hold butter alternatives and other spreads without a plastic coating or plastic lining. 

Consumer goods companies have been trialing paper packaging as an alternative to plastic in response to a regulatory crackdown in some countries as well as a growing customer preference for what they perceive as more environmentally-friendly products. 

However, to stop leaks, particularly of liquids and oil-based products, much of the paper-based packaging for food and drinks involves plastic coating, which makes it unrecyclable, or plastic lining, which needs to be removed before the cardboard can be recycled. This is a process that few municipal waste schemes can handle. Starch coatings can be compostable, but not recyclable.

The new tubs Upfield has developed over four years, with US-based materials group Footprint, are made from compressed wet paper fibres with a coating made from a non-plastic material, the details of which it would not disclose in order to protect the intellectual property, it said.

The containers will first appear this year in Austria, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany, and then other countries in Europe by 2025. The company said that in some countries, including Spain Hungary and Poland, the packaging would not be able to be labelled as recyclable, due to roughly 4 per cent of material in the coating and tub, including the label. However, it would still be accepted in the paper recycling stream in the UK, Netherlands and Germany.

“Our current plan is that by the time we launch in these markets, we will have advanced the tub to a stage where these thresholds and coating rules will not form an impediment to the on-pack promotion of recycling,” the company said.

In 2022, as part of its Green Deal, the European parliament proposed ambitious legislation to standardise rules on packaging waste across the bloc, including targets for reducing the amount of material used for both plastic and paper, and with a heavy emphasis on re-use of packaging. 

The paper packaging industry is vehemently opposed to the plans, arguing that single-use paper packs are more efficient than reusable plastic.

Upfield’s aim is for the new packs to put the group on track to reduce its total plastic content by 80 per cent by 2030. The company is also attempting to improve its progress on emissions across its operations and supply chain, after its net zero goal was set back to a 2050 target compared with 2039 if it had it remained part of Unilever.

Upfield’s head of research and development John Verbakel said a lifecycle assessment of the new paper tub compared to a plastic one found that they had a similar carbon impact, but that paper packing technologies were still in the early stages of development compared to plastic, and he expected they would become more efficient over time. 

He also noted that the lifecycle assessments were based on the premise that all plastic tubs would be recycled, compared with Europe’s actual plastic recycling rate of about 40 per cent. 

“If the recycling does not work, the plastic will stay there for 500 years. Paper does not,” he said. The company said it expected the packaging to be certified as compostable by next year. 

In a campaign, the business lobby group Together for Sustainable Packaging cited studies that showed recycled materials in packaging could reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 70 per cent while reusables would increase water use by up to 267 per cent. 

The European Environment Bureau, a network of environmental organisations, published a report in September claiming that disposable paper-based food packaging was a “false solution” to the waste crisis, raising concerns about deforestation and arguing that EU rules should tackle all single-use packaging, regardless of the material. 

Verbakel said paper for the new packaging would be from PEFC-certified suppliers, who source wood from sustainably managed forests.

“For us it’s very important to move away from the fossil industry. We need to go . . . to a more renewable side, which will have challenges but challenges are there to be addressed,” he said, adding, “Four years ago, I thought paper packaging was completely impossible.”

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