Elmira’s Own Chooses NatureFlex to Wrap Its Vine-Ripened Tomatoes
By Futamura Chemicals Company Limited
Located in rural Ontario Canada, Elmira’s Own Tomatoes has supplied the local and surrounding communities with delicious, quality vegetables for many years.
Their tomatoes are left to ripen on the vine, allowing for maximum flavour and nutrient content. The company maintains natural growing practices, using bumble bees to pollinate the plants and introducing additional bugs to help balance the eco-system. Water recycling and other environmental measures ensure that best sustainability practices are observed.
This summer, Elmira’s Own took the next step: changing their conventional plastic packaging to adopt a renewable and compostable alternative. Their delicious tomatoes are now packed in a compostable fibre pulp tray and wrapped in a transparent NatureFlex™ film, NatureFlex NVS.
NatureFlex NVS matches the ethical ethos of Elmira’s Own brand. The films are highly renewable, being manufactured from wood pulp sourced from sustainably managed plantations. They also meet all the global standards for industrial composting (including EN13432) and are certified to OK compost’s home composting standard for backyard composting. This means that they can go straight into the garden compost bin, diverting waste from landfill.
According to Stuart Horst of Elmira’s own; “The qualification of a new packaging for our tomatoes required a series of tests. We considered a variety of materials, however NatureFlex NVS proved to be best suited for our requirements. Not only does the film compost extremely fast, it also allowed us to increase the shelf life of our produce! That is something very positive for our business. Preserving the quality of our vine-ripened tomatoes is essential so that our customers experience them at their best.”
Christopher Tom, Futamura Regional Sales added, “We are delighted that Elmira’s Own has chosen our NatureFlex film to package its range of tomatoes. Our product complements their high-quality produce, protects the tomatoes for longer and can be composted after use – it’s the perfect match.”
NatureFlex NVS is designed to run on existing fresh produce flowrap packaging lines. The film is ideally suited to package fruit and vegetables: once the consumer has used the produce, the film can simply be composted along with the left-over peelings and other discarded scraps.
Futamura Chemicals Company Limited is a major producer of plastic and cellulose (NatureFlex™ & Cellophane™) films. Following the acquisition of Innovia Films cellulose business, Futamura has a global footprint with production sites in the UK, USA and Japan. It holds a leading global position in the markets for renewable and compostable packaging films and cellulose casings. Worldwide Futamura employs some 1500 people, with a focus on safety, high quality speciality products, R&D, customer service and ethical, sustainable partnerships.
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