Cutting corners

“We don't believe there's a good or bad material intrinsically, rather that the correct material for the right application is of pivotal importance.”
-Anne Roulin

With the issue of sustainability on the minds of all in the packaging industry, Nestlé's Head of Global Packaging, Anne Roulin, divulges what the company is doing to reduce its carbon footprint and still remain innovative.

As the issue of sustainability weighs ever more on the shoulders of food and beverage producers, packaging innovators are on the hunt to increase resource efficiency, eliminate the production of waste and reduce their environmental impact through improved design and the use of alternative materials.

One company breaking barriers to spearhead this new trend is Nestlé, with its bold embracement of new packaging ideas and early adoption of promising new technologies. As Head of Global Packaging, Anne Roulin has her finger on the pulse when it comes to understanding the direction that packaging producers now need to take.

Nestlé has had great success in the UK in terms of the work it has done to reduce the packaging used for Easter eggs and Christmas selection boxes. Is this initiative something that has been solely reserved to the UK or has it been rolled out on a larger scale? Also, do you intend to use the same strategy for any other products?

Anne Roulin. Definitely. This is a program that we've had in place since 1991. Every year we have projects related to reducing the weight and volume of packaging and we track it on a worldwide basis. The last two years have been particularly successful. In 2008 we reduced it by 58 million kilos. We thought this was really outstanding, but in 2009 we actually did slightly better at 59 million kilos. This is obviously a huge amount and it's really tens of hundreds of projects around the world in different areas to get to this result. However, we think that we're going to come to a kind of plateau, because if you keep on going like that then finally you'll have no packaging left.

So we're taking a different approach now because we realised it's going to be getting more difficult - we've actually implemented very big IT platform across the company, which we call Globe. Part of this IT platform relates to purchasing. Now we're capable of analyzing the worldwide purchasing arena, which is around 150,000 purchasing events around the world for packaging alone. We're taking that data and analyzing it to be able to decide on what the biggest opportunities are, then we can focus our efforts and resources on the big projects rather than a lot of small ones. We've got a number of different areas in different types of packaging where we're looking at bringing various businesses together as well.

Nestlé Waters launched a three litre, stackable PET water bottle in North America in 2006, which won an award for best packaging innovation design. Can you explain the background to this and give details of the response that it received? Was it made available outside the US?

AR. That was actually developed by my team when I was responsible for packaging in Nestlé Waters and it was developed in our R&D centre in France. It was a response to a very specific demand in the US as they were having a lot of problems with their larger sized containers being out of stock on the shelves as obviously you can't get many on a typical grocery store shelf - and if they're selling fast they needed a different solution. They were looking for a display ready pallet that had ideally no second repackaging. We had teased them because it should be a pallet that held together like magic. We actually nicknamed the project the Holy Grail.

The only way to do it was to have something stackable, so the packages inter-nested. We didn't quite achieve absolutely no secondary packaging, but instead a very limited amount of stretch wrap to hold the whole pallet. It definitely did boost sales. It was rolled out in a range of our Nestlé Waters brand in the US. However, that particular design wasn't rolled out to Europe or other parts of the world. We do buy less of that format, especially in Europe, and that tends to be either even larger ones or the more standard formatted one in a half litre. There wasn't really the same customer demand in other parts of the world.

Consumers everywhere are becoming increasingly aware of the need to lessen their impact on the environment. The amount of waste we create obviously plays a large part of this. How does Nestlé go about combining convenient and ethical benefits with packaging innovation?

AR. Well, that's part of the challenge of creating good packaging. We're having to balance many different factors together; convenience and ethical benefits are only two of them. There are plenty of others as well. We have to find the right combination here. For example, we're currently rolling out this programme based on life cycle assessment, but it's a much quicker, simpler way of analyzing the difference between different packaging choices versus specific applications. For a trend user, within about an hour or so you compare different scenarios in terms of environmental impact. The interesting thing is that you can analyze a range of different environmental impacts.

It's not only climate change with greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 footprints that a lot of other people are talking about. We also look at water usage, land usage, the effect on air pollution, the effect on soil pollution and of course the energy expenditure. The kind of output we get from this is like a spider plot where you can very easily compare one material with another. This allows us to really analyze the trade-off between different packaging material choices for specific applications and sometimes the results are very surprising and not what you'd intuitively think. This gives us facts and figures to base our packaging development on and make the right choices right at the beginning of the process.

What are the main benefits that Nestlé has experienced from employing eco-design in packaging?

AR. Well, there's a number of them, especially sometimes comparing paper and plastic laminate. Many consumers think paper is good and plastic is bad; something you see but it's certainly not the case. We don't believe there's a good or bad material intrinsically, rather that the correct material for the right application is of pivotal importance. Also, the term 'bio-plastics' is slightly vague. It's one that we struggle with because in one sense it's used to relate to biodegradable materials, but in another sense it's used for materials from new and sustainable sources. It's really the latter part that we're investigating because one-day oil will run out and we'll need to have other sources of material for packaging.

Secondly, through the work we've done with TK and full life cycle effects, we can see that bio-plastics of the future will enable us to decrease the environmental impact of our packaging. This is the main reason for us working in this area. This joint venture is actually a sponsorship at the Ecoles Des Mines with a number of other companies. Specifically, we're doing this because we realize that there is little fundamental research going on in the area of bio-plastics.

Most of it is individual companies working on specific solutions, which we feel should be underpinned with more basic research, and the Ecoles Des Mines is particularly well equipped for this. Along with their research goes teaching, so they'll be working with students with a sound understanding. In parallel with that, we're working with various companies to evaluate solutions using bio-plastics. We've implemented a few of them and we have more coming along in the pipeline.

Nestlé has been exploring the opportunities that the Kansei engineering approach brings to packaging design. Today, Kansei is one of the specific tools in Nestlé's Packaging and Design toolbox for consumer centric development. Can you tell us about the work that is being done in this arena?

AR. Kansei was a technique originally developed in Japan and is used to link the emotional response of a consumer to the actual product. It's also called affective engineering and is a very interesting technique. We've piloted it in a number of different areas, but it's only one of the techniques that we're using within this whole area of affective engineering. Within our basic research centre, which is close to here in Lozan, we've got a group that is working on the psychological reaction of consumers with products and packaging. Kansei is one of the tools we have in our toolbox.

Apart from that, we're developing specific physical methodologies in order to link physical premises to consumer reactions. One of the things that Nestlé has done is to sponsor a programme in Lozan on the brain and mind in relation to food and packaging. We're adopting new techniques looking outside of the food industry like we've done with Kansei. We're developing a few techniques internally whilst also being constantly involved in research at universities. It's quite a long-term approach, but it's something you start six months prior and you get the magic results.

Protecting the authenticity of our food and drink is a major concern for many manufacturers. What packaging schedules, if any, does Nestlé employ to protect against counterfeiting?

AR. Well, I wouldn't say that it's a major concern in the food industry today. We suspect that there could be more in the future, as a report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) indicates that food could be an issue in the future, so we're adopting different strategies as appropriate.

Ensuring food safety and freshness is obviously a very important role of packaging. What innovations are we seeing at the moment that could help to further increase the levels of safety and freshness?

AR. We have a huge problem with packaging safety, so we're really pushing for much more transparency through the whole supply chain. This is a programme that we started three years ago to really work in partnership with our suppliers to understand all the components much better. This has led our suppliers to work more closely with their suppliers. In the first round of pilots we've had 50 major suppliers working with us from around the world. In addition, we've been working a lot on changing our auditing process. This should really induce a change in the food industry as a whole.