PET Habitat

As the global beverage industry continues to serve up more innovative products to meet growing consumer demand for healthier, tastier and longer-lasting hydration options, there probably has never been a better time to be in the aseptic processing and packaging business than now.

Developed as an alternative to the traditional hot-filling beverage production process, aseptic cold-fill technology offers a plethora of consumer and environmental benefits that are simply too good to ignore or downplay, including extended product shelf-life, no need for refrigeration, lower energy consumption, and gentler processing to protect the quality of the ingredients’ flavors, textures, appearance and health benefits without the use of preservatives.

As such, aseptic packaging is rapidly becoming a preferred choice in the production of all types of liquid dairy products, juices and nectars, isotonics, iced tea and coffee, and many other shelf-stable beverages requiring optimal protection from microbiological contamination, light, oxygen and temperature extremes.

According to market research from Mordor Intelligence, the global market for aseptic packaging is expected to grow to an estimated US$105.2 billion by 2028 from US$63.9 billion this year, representing CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of just over 10.4 per cent during the forecast five-year period.

While China and the Asia Pacific markets will account for the largest share of that growth, accounting for over 20 per cent each, those regions will be closely followed by double-digit growth across North, Central and South America, driven by factors that include:

• Growing consumer demand for convenient and functional drinks, such as RTD coffee and tea, energy drinks, and other beverages that can be consumed whenever and wherever they need a boost.
• The increased demand for nutraceutical and “functional” beverages and products containing healthy ingredients such as vegetables and fruits, along with rising global demand for milk-based drinks and plant-based dairy alternatives.
• The increasing demand for instant energy drinks that provide mental and physical stimulation among fitness enthusiasts.
• The growing health-and-wellness trend driving demand for juices, and other functional beverage requiring cost-effective packaging solutions in the beverage segment, according to Mordor Intelligence.

Having already established a sizable marketplace worldwide, the ranks of aseptic packaging producers have attracted some of the world’s largest beverage processing and packaging suppliers competing in that space, including the likes of Tetra Pak, Amcor, Sealed Air, SIG, Elopak and Sidel, among others.

And while all these companies are locked in intense competition for market share, the aseptic beverage packaging sector is also characterized by an uncommon level of collaboration and partnerships rarely found in other food and beverage sectors—often working together for the bigger cause of making aseptic packaging technology more mainstream, versatile, cost-effective, environmentally-friendlier and, above all, more appealing to the consumers.

This penchant for collaboration was vividly underscored during last month’s two-day international symposium on aseptic PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic aseptic packaging hosted in Chicago by Sidel.

Attracting over 150 representatives from supplier companies comprising Sidel’s aseptic packaging supply chain, the informative forum made a convincing case why PET is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative to the traditional paperboard drinking cartons that have dominated the aseptic beverage packaging market to date.

While the aseptic beverage cartons popularized by Tetra Pak, SIG and Elopak have been able to gain considerable market share by being early adopters of the aseptic packaging process, their market dominance will be challenged in coming years by PET bottles, according to Sidel’s vice-president of packaging Vincent Le Guen, by a new generation of lighter-weight, easily recyclable, and attractively designed PET bottles offering similarly effective shelf life and product protection benefits as the cartons, with arguably a lesser carbon footprint.

For one thing, the much-lauded recyclability of beverage cartons is not as straightforward as generally portrayed because these cartons are actually multi-material containers combining paperboard with thin layers of plastic and aluminum foil that all must be separated at the end of life to enable true full recyclability.

This results in a much more complex and energy-intensive process than with the monomaterial PET containers, which have the advantage of being compatible with most existing mechanical recycling streams across North America and Europe.

Moreover, PET offers a critical advantage of significant reduction in material use through light-weighing, according to Le Guen, whereby a standard empty PET bottle weighing 19 grams in 1990 now weighs only 6.5 grams, without any notable degradation in quality or performance.

And thanks to ongoing technological advances, aseptic PET bottles can incorporate up to 50 per cent recycled content (rPET) to offer a more attractive environmental profile backed up by numerous LCA (life-cycle analysis) studies—making them a highly attractive packaging option for facilitating plastics circularity.

In terms of shelf impact, PET bottles also offer virtually limitless possibilities in terms of shapes and sizes to help brand-owners achieve maximum product differentiation on the shelf level, often rivaling the appearance and performance attributes of premium glass packaging.

With its 2018 acquisition of the Gentlebrand design agency in Mexico City, Sidel has made full use of its new formidable in-house packaging design expertise to create hundreds of attractive customized bottle designs for brand owners all over the world to market their product more effectively, while drastically reducing their time-to-market.

As Gentlebrand’s business area manager for the Americas region Shantal Alfaro explained, “We are a very unique design agency in the sense that other branding agencies typically approach their product packaging design only from an aesthetic branding and marketing perspective.

“Of course, it’s vitally important to take these marketing aspects into consideration for new product development,” Alfaro acknowledged, “but we also keenly focus on the technical and structural aspects to make sure that whatever we design is going to be a feasible solution on the customers’ packaging line and all the way through their supply chain to the marketplace.

“As such, we can accompany our customers from design to the actual new product launches—from concept to industrialization,” Alfaro stated.

To do all this, Gentlebrand employs highly skilled and talented multidisciplinary design teams based in Italy and France to develop “tailor-made solutions that help customers convey their message to the final consumer.

“The idea is to create real meaning to packaging design,” she said, “in order to capture the consumer’s attention during the few seconds it takes them to make their purchasing decision at the retail shelf level.”

As Alfaro divulged, “In the traditional process, brand-owners separate their marketing teams and their technical teams, whereby it’s usually just the marketing teams that approach design agencies to execute their creative inspirations.

“But often, that new design can fail in the real world because they may have overlooked the fact that they don’t have sufficient number of physical packaging lines to execute that design effectively, or there may be some obstacles in their supply chain to prevent them from implementing that design,” she said.

That usually means going back to the drawing board, Alfaro pointed out, resulting in significant delays to the product launch or extension.

“With our process, we optimize our creativity phase database alongside our engineering phase and run them in parallel right from the kickoff of the project,” Alfaro stated.

This synchronized approach ultimately results in significantly shorter time-to-market, according to Alfaro.

“It has been proven time and time again that delaying the launch of a new product can really have an adverse impact on revenue opportunities, market share and customer satisfaction,” she said.

“With more and more product entering the market, consumers are continuously looking for new innovations, be it in the decorative pattern, the package size, ingredients, flavors and so on, “ she summed up, “so the idea is to not only to make that launch faster, but to make that launch more effectively.

“And although we work with many other materials other than PET, she concluded, “PET allows us to be very flexible in terms of package design possibilities—allowing us to create different unique solutions that will have a real positive impact for both our customers and the final consumer.”