problem with plastics,” she says. “Te industry can’t move away from plastic if there isn’t an alternative for them.” Packaging producer


Huhtamaki saw the potential in Morro and the partnership has resulted in Just Eat launching Huhtamaki-produced packaging featuring Morro coating, first in Germany. Roll-out to 10 additional European countries was recently announced. “Tis is not an idea in the lab, this is a real-life example and this


“The industry can’t move away from plastic if there isn’t an alternative for them”


great properties, including grease barrier and water barrier properties and heat sealability,” explains French. “And then they looked to how these can be applied in industry.” Today, that work is being


put into practice through Xampla’s partnership with delivery company Just Eat, which began in 2025. Delegates at the FCSI EAME Conference will hear more about the partnership during French’s presentation, where she will share examples of how the technology is being used. “I am really excited to


share the science behind our materials with an audience of foodservice professionals who will understand the scale of the


partnership is validation that it really works,” says French. Having started out with


a focus on encapsulation and films – finding plastic-free ways to create containers for materials such as detergents – a growing demand in the market for sustainable coatings caused the company to pivot. “Tere is a big trend in


packaging with a move away from plastic toward paper, but you need to have those functional properties,” she explains. “If you put wet salad in a paper box it won’t last; you need those barrier coatings to enable the move away from plastics.” Te challenge is significant


and the figures are staggering, if not unfamiliar. Every year, says French, there are 400 million


tonnes of plastic produced. “It is not all for foodservice, but 40% of it is for packaging. Again, that is not all foodservice packaging but plastic in food packaging is a big issue,” she says


It is often cited that the


vast majority of all plastic ever produced has not been recycled and billions of tonnes still exists on earth. “Tis is one of the problems we face, especially when we’re talking about foodservice – you don’t need your packaging to last hundreds of years,” she says. But it is clear that the


industry and consumers want to move away from single- use plastics. “A really high percentage of consumers will actively choose takeaways with sustainable packaging,” she says. Another pressure comes


around fossil fuel materials, as the price of oil directly impacts the price of plastic, which leads to increasing costs in the products it is used for. “So having materials that are not reliant on fossil fuels is something else we’re seeing as well,” she says.


It is estimated that there


are hundreds of billions of items of foodservice packaging used every year and getting on for a trillion-odd sachets – the numbers are big and the small company from Cambridge has big ambitions to match. “Our target is to replace 10 billion items of single-use plastic over the next five years,” says French. “Te potential impact we can make is huge.”


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