Atria, who has been a customer to AR Packaging Flexibles (former Flextrus) for a long time, came to us in need of a new packaging for Lönneberga's new chicken toppings that breathes and lives climate and environmentally friendly. Said and done, our sales manager Anders Cederholm launched the project together with our development department and developed prototypes.

The trend of updating its packaging to reduce the overall environmental impact of the product is something we have seen for a long time. Last spring, the Swedish Food Retailers Federation communicated their goal that all packaging in Ica, Coop and Axfoods stores should be renewable or recyclable by year 2030. Atria was quick to understand, before the initiative, what direction food packaging is about to go. AR Packaging Flexibles Innovation team has a sense for capturing trends and signalling this to our customers in the idea generation and are experts in speed to market.

It was important for Atria to maximize the amount of material in the packaging that came from renewable sources without reducing the recyclability of the packaging or risking the durability of the product with a lower barrier. Therefore, we started to produce a packaging of conventional plastics from renewable raw materials and paper.

With our existing product PaperLite® at the bottom and the newly created lidding film Ecobar 12/50 Bio with renewable raw material PE, we managed to produce a packaging of 64% renewable content. The base web also contains 68% fibre and is therefore recycled as paper.

PE from renewable raw materials is constructed in exactly the same way as normal PE made from oil. The only difference is that sugar cane is used instead. This means that it does not risk contaminating existing recycle streams.

Atria sees an increased demand for white meat, both for health and climate reasons, and when the chicken is locally produced and Keyhole-labelled (Healthy choices made easy) gets a climate-friendly packaging with renewable material, we are doing our best to protect the environment.