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Recart Is Ready To Pounce
BY ANDREW WOOD
Recart Is Ready To Pounce RECART CHALLENGES CANS Canning has dominated food preservation for two hundred years. But TetraPak’s Recart is striding into the packaging market. Can 2005 be the beginning of the end for cans? RON HOHENHAUS
1 January 2005
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Retort cartons are lighter than cans. That means lower transport costs. But success may depend on government policies and consumer attitudes to recycling.
Shoppers looking for tinned tomatoes at Sainsbury, one of Britain’s biggest supermarket chains, are in for disappointment. Sainsbury doesn’t stock them any more. You can still buy chopped tomatoes. But not in tin cans.
Since late last year, Sainsbury has switched from metal cylinders to rectangular packs made of cardboard for four varieties of their tomatoes. The company says the TetraPak Recart packs are easier for customers to open and store, and that the tomatoes taste much better than if they’d been in cans.
‘These packs are certainly the shape of the future,’ says Les Rowse, Sainsbury’s buying manager for canned food. (His job title may have to change if his predictions prove correct.)
Mr Biggs says the challenge for manufacturers will be in determining how they can use the information available to benefit from RFID within the supply chain.
‘[They] don’t need a tin opener to open, and .t better in the cupboard and fridge. Unlike tin cans, the Tetra Recart cartons are made mainly from a renewable resource – trees. And with a purpose-built carton recycling plant now in operation in the UK, they can also be recycled.’ The US company Hormel Foods, perhaps most famous for its Spam meat, has also made the change for two of its key brands of chilli: Stagg and Hormel.
The firm’s reasoning is similar to Sainsbury’s: ‘Our consumer research showed a clear preference for this new packaging concept,’ says Larry Vorpahl, Hormel’s vice-president.
Customers, he says, also like the fact that the products in Recart are preservative-free.
It’s just under two hundred years since tin cans revolutionised food processing. A Frenchman, Nicolas Appert, spent fourteen years experimenting with food preservation before unveiling his method in 1809: food was sealed tightly inside a bottle or jar and heated to a certain temperature for a certain time. The container was then kept shut until the food was consumed. (He didn’t understand how it worked—it took another .fty years before Louis Pasteur explained how the heat killed microorganisms.)
In 1810, an Englishman called Peter Durand patented the use of tin-coated iron cans instead of bottles. And modern canning was born.
Little has changed in principle since. Steel has replaced iron. Manual soldering has been replaced by crimped seams and automated sealing.
Steel cans are tough. They can withstand the extremes of heat in the canning process, and they stand up to rough handling.
But they’re heavy. And the heavier they are, the more energy is consumed transporting them.
Retort pouches have already made inroads into markets traditionally dominated by tin cans. But creating cardboard cartons that are sturdy enough to survive sterilisation and distribution has proved dif.cult. TetraPak, though, believes it has solved most of these problems. Hormel says its Tetra Recart line runs at speeds of up to 24,000 packages per hour—similar to the capacity of modern canning lines, and exceptionally fast for a carton system.
Tetra Recart works with batch-retorting systems, which sterilise the package and contents simultaneously using steam and hot water. There are potential logistical bene.ts to Tetra Recart. Because the packs are square and not round, there’s less wasted space. Up to 50 per cent more packages .t on pallets and supermarket shelves. Despite the theoretical advantages, there are other issues to be considered when thinking about what switching from cans to retort cartons or other alternatives.
‘The focus has to be on what the consumers want, and not what some packaging researcher thinks the consumer wants,’ says Ulrich Metzger, vice-president of Nestlé Indonesia.
‘From our perspective, we can’t say we prefer can or glass or pouch because it’s very different from one country to another.’
Mr Metzger says that government policies on recycling can make a lot of difference. If a country has an ef.cient can recycling system in place, then cans may still make more sense. But if it doesn’t, and landfill sites are in short supply, then pouches or cartons may have the edge environmentally. Early adopters of Tetra Recart are in Europe and North America. But late last year the first Asian user was announced. A Thai company, Agripure Holdings River Kwai International Food
Industry, said it was forming a joint venture with Del Monte Asia and Samroiyod to use TetraPak
retort cartons. A plant is being built in Thailand’s Trad province that should come on-stream in
December, packing sweet corn, pineapple and other fruits and vegetables for export.
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