BALANCING FOOD QUALITY AND SUSTAINABILITY
Sustainability or performance? Don’t compromise – you can have both.
Kurt Richars, Director of Market Development at Anchor Packaging
When working to minimize our environmental impact, don’t lose sight of a key fact: reducing food waste is the most sustainable action a retailer can take. The good news is operators can do this while delivering a superior customer experience and creating greater operational efficiency - making their sustainability efforts economically sustainable, too.
The Possibilities & Potential
Imagine packaging that could protect and preserve prepared food quality for hours, reducing labor and food costs while remaining easily recoverable after use. Such a solution would enable operators to reduce waste while increasing sales and improving profitability. These solutions are readily available today, but seeing them requires addressing this question in a new way.
What Is Sustainable Packaging?
Packaging plays many essential roles, so it is important to consider its function before determining how to reduce its environmental impact. Generally speaking, the environmental footprint of the packaging is always less than the product it holds. This is certainly true for food-contact packaging. In the case of prepared food, particularly proteins, the resources and energy required to produce a shelf-ready meal are often several hundred times greater than the package that protects it.
If a package cannot protect the meal by maintaining quality and integrity so that it gets eaten and not wasted, the impact extends beyond the food itself. When food is wasted, everything it took to prepare it is lost, too. A more accurate accounting of its environmental impact includes everything required to prepare a meal, from farm to fork. And, because not all packaging types provide the same level of protection, we must consider both the food and the packaging at the same time when striving to improve operational sustainability.
Simply put, improving packaging sustainability should be less of a substrate-based decision and more of a full consideration of its capabilities. How well can the package protect the food it holds?
WHAT’S IN STORE | 2025
The opportunity is significant. Over 20% of our daily carbon footprint comes from the food we eat. Further, it is estimated that as much as half the energy used annually is related to food production and distribution. Yet, more than a third of all food produced is wasted and not eaten. Also, food waste represents the single largest share of US landfills and the largest source of landfill-based methane. Reducing the percentage of food wasted annually by 1 point would return the equivalent of removing one million passenger cars from US roads for an entire year.
Fortunately, packaging’s function creates a unique opportunity to deliver an outsized benefit. Why? Over 80% of food waste occurs after food reaches a restaurant or retailer. Packaging performance can make the most significant difference in this last leg of the supply chain, including the final mile extending into consumers’ homes. Protecting quality longer, creating shelf appeal, keeping food safe and untouched, offering easy and highly visible leftovers storage, and enabling convenient reheating all contribute to ensuring more food gets eaten and less is wasted.
Beyond protecting food, packaging must also offer the user a viable alternative to disposal after use. Similar to performance differences between packaging types, not all packaging materials enjoy the same acceptance levels for recovery. To be effective, recovery access must also be convenient. Consumers choose the product, not the package. Rightly, they expect retailers to make it easy for them to act.
When solving for the highest recovery acceptance rates and convenient access, packages made with recyclable materials are the best solution for most consumers and municipalities. In addition, consumers understand recycling well, making it easy to act. Consequently, it is the solution preferred by most. This insight has been repeatedly confirmed by Technomic’s foodservice research, most recently in the 2024 Takeout and Delivery report.
Materials Consideration
Modern consumers want their food choices to do Designing recycle-ready packaging requires it to remain recyclable after use. For food-contact packages, this includes enabling the consumer to put it in the recovery stream clean & dry. Consumers can easily clean packaging made with PET, HDPE, and PP after food-contact use and put it into single-stream recycling systems. Compostable packaging offers
© 2025 International Dairy Deli Bakery Association
Balancing Food Quality and Sustainability
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