Ensuring Food Safety With CRYOVAC® Brand High-Performance Barrier Packaging

Always on Guard

From panicked consumers who left meat shelves empty to baby boomers who are now more comfortable with click-and-collect shopping; from traffic management inside the store to the need for dedicated staff to constantly sanitise shopping baskets and store surfaces – this is the retail food environment in 2020. And while we can acknowledge we’ve seen changes many of us wouldn’t have thought possible only a few short months ago – we also know we’re not done.

In the midst of a human health crisis generated by a novel virus, it should come as no surprise to the food industry that consumers are becoming hyper-vigilant when it comes to environmental hygiene, food safety, and the protection of our food supply from contamination, spoilage and degradation. Consumers have started looking across the global food supply chain, asking us to do more to ensure their health and safety - and that’s why now, more than ever, you need CRYOVAC® brand high-performance barrier packaging. 

When it comes to protecting perishable foods, Sealed Air typically recommends the use of multi-layer, barrier materials. While some foods like fresh produce or fresh poultry call for non-barrier films and bags, most other applications benefit from some level of barrier properties for the highest levels of protection from product degradation, physical or chemical spoilage, or microbiological contamination.

Performance Drives Sustainability

When compared to single layer monoplastics, multilayer barrier plastics provide additional and desired properties such as durability against punctures or tears, protection from oxygen or light, oxygen or odour scavenging properties, protection against microorganisms, and yes, even protection from viruses. And, while these characteristics are what make CRYOVAC® brand barrier films exceptional in terms of food protection, these highly valued performance characteristics are also what renders these materials harder to recycle. 

Over the past several years, global concerns and regulations about single use plastic have become part of our public consciousness. Food packaging materials with characteristics such as being single layer, made with recycled materials, or those marketed as easier-to-recycle have positioned themselves against barrier plastics as being more “sustainable”. 

At Sealed Air, we invest a lot of time and effort into keeping a pulse on what consumers want from their food packaging. And while we continue to see widespread consumer interest in finding packaging choices that are more sustainable, what consumers define as sustainable is set to change – especially when it comes to potential trade-offs between environmental concerns versus package performance.