Country: Australia and New Zealand

Category: Food

World-first mono material retort pouch: Australian Organic Food Co. have developed a world-first Vanilla Custard Mono Material Retort Pouch that has taken the region by storm. This world-first packaging has been developed for Vanilla Custard; a delicious, portable snack made with certified organic ingredients.

The Vanilla custard is packaged in spouted pouches to ensure that the product can be consumed directly. The custard is thermally processed using the retort sterilisation method which, along with the high-barrier packaging, means the custard requires no refrigeration after processing. This combination of packaging and process has many advantages, not only for consumer convenience, but for efficiency in material usage, low CO2 emissions, water usage, food safety, and food waste prevention. The challenge with spouted formats has always been recyclability; until now.

Whilst this looks like a typical spout pouch, it represents a significant leap forward in mono-material innovation. The mono-material structure of our packaging ensures that the entire pack is fully recyclable, making it an environmentally friendly option.

To further enhance the design, the new cap shape uses 20% less plastic compared to the previous version, without compromising functionality or accessibility. This thoughtful improvement underscores our commitment to material reduction.

Producing mono-material retort pouches reliably remains a requiring control and precision at every stage of the process. Adding a rigid plastic fitment into the pouch creates a new set of technical challenges, which our combined team have overcome in the development of this pack. Bonding soft-plastics to rigid plastics at high speed typically requires temperatures too high for mono-material structures, often leading to material shrinkage or damage to the barrier layer.

Our pack utilises a state-of-the-art retort-grade barrier PP film, which provides exceptional barrier performance even after undergoing the retort sterilisation process.

This cutting-edge material is complemented by a unique, highly specialised blown polypropylene film for the sealant layer (confidential). This film provides an ideal balance of softness for high-speed filling and durability throughout the supply chain. It is a very important, but confidential feature of our design.

To utilise these new materials, an augmented approach to straw insertion was implemented, which tempers the straws before welding (confidential). This reduces the amount of heat required to weld them to the pouch body, thereby minimising the risk of shrinkage or damage to the outer layers while maintaining production efficiency.

This project was years in the making. Flavour Makers is the largest producer of organic baby food in Australia, and while their AOFC custard is the first launch to use these materials, this design and process have ultimately been developed with baby food in mind.

The manufacturers involved in this project—all leaders in their fields—brought their latest advancements to the table to make this package possible. Companies from Italy, Thailand, Japan (two), and Australia (two), including some that are market competitors, all collaborated in the spirit of innovation and sustainability in the creation of this pack. Collaboration was the key to this groundbreaking design and is the theme for this award entry.