Consumer
Paper world While sustainability remains high on the agenda for packaging companies, there is a major
difference between words and action. Nestlé has never turned away from a challenge, especially when so much is at stake, which is why it has taken a major step in the sustainability journey by
turning all the plastic packaging in its Smarties brand into paper. Alexander von Maillot, category head of ice cream and confectionery, and Bruce Funnell, head of packaging global confectionery – both of Nestlé – talk to Matthew Rogerson about that journey, and what Nestlé has learned so far.
N
ever one to shy away from a challenge, Nestlé has ambitious sustainability targets, starting with 100%-reusable or recyclable packaging by 2025, and reducing its use of virgin plastics by a third in the same time period. It is important to appreciate how momentous these changes are, and the sheer scale of what that means for packaging and packaging waste. While the target of turning the plastic packaging of Smarties into paper is not the start of the journey for Nestlé, it is still incredibly significant. It is the first major brand in confectionery to achieve this, and it is the first time a core brand of a major multinational corporation has managed to completely remove all plastic from its packaging. Alexander von Maillot, who heads Nestlé’s ice cream and confectionery division, provides an executive, commercial perspective on quite how gargantuan the effort involved has been. “I, like many others, felt that this would be a relatively simple undertaking, and was amazed by how complex it truly was. We had to change 90% of our portfolio and 419 SKUs [stock keeping units] into different formats to move from plastic to paper. We removed 400t of plastic in the process. The
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more we tackled this issue, the more changes we realised we would have to make: the cap has to go, the large bag, the wrapping around multipacks... there was a lot of plastic we realised we needed to remove.” While the decision to move to paper might have appeared an easy one to make, “the devil is really in the details”, Von Maillot confirms. “We cannot use the same format, the same shapes, the same sizes because, in paper, you cannot do what you can do in plastic. Suddenly, you are talking about changing the commercial proposition to customers. Something that was a certain weight and size, after we moved into paper, is a different format with different sizes and moving through the supply chain differently, and even impacting the centimetres square retail shelf space we used to use.”
These are major changes, and Nestlé had to innovate, maintaining the reclosable top (still made of paper, not plastic) by using a hexagon shape instead of a circular tube. Consumers have asked for a sustainable solution to resolve the issue of plastic waste, and Nestlé has delivered in creative fashion. As Von Maillot explains, making a packaging change like this one leads
Packaging & Converting Intelligence /
www.pci-mag.com
Nestlé
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