With the ever-changing consumer tastes and preferences, PIL has designed product categories to fill this gap with specific emphasis on packaging designed to reduce food waste. “Food packaging is often viewed as having a negative impact on the environment. However, packaging can protect food, prolong shelf life, and reduce environmental impact by reducing food waste.

She adds that consumer knowledge and levels of awareness, interests, and appreciation of these packaging functions are significant factors in their refusal or acceptance of emerging packaging technologies, whether those technologies are directed explicitly at reducing food waste or not and that consumers’ complex relationship with food packaging creates a barrier to food-saving practices.

Vaishali says that in as much as the current global trend is to have recyclable packaging, at Packaging Industries Limited, they often prioritize packaging design to reduce food waste before considering its recyclability.

“We focus on innovation that tackles both problems of packaging sustainability and food waste prevention in tandem. We design beyond
merely getting the product to the consumer and instead embrace taking responsibility for consumers’ climate impacts from downstream food waste,” she adds.

She further explains that educating consumers on the tradeoffs between packaging sustainability and food waste is often difficult adding that on average, only 3-3.5% of the climate impact of packaged food comes from the packaging itself – the rest comes from producing, transporting, storing, preparing, and potentially disposing of the food. This proportion she says can be significantly higher for certain kinds of foods and formats, but ultimately, packaging “pays off ” if it helps to reduce waste of the food it contains by at least 4%.