This article features otherwise unpublished food safety management data held by BRCGS and Safefood 360° which, combined with real-time events, provides an unparalleled view of current and emerging issues and trends in the food safety industry.

If you grow, make, serve or sell products you will be used to thinking about their ingredients and processing and how they impact safety and quality. However, one of the most important ‘ingredients’ or part of a ‘process’ for any product is the packaging. Here we aim to raise the profile of packaging and recognising the critical role it plays in delivering a safe, quality and durable product to the consumer. We will explore the history of packaging, its role in protecting products, safety considerations, voluntary third-party assurance and some considerations of the environmental impact.

 

History

Humans have always had a need to transport and store products and, due to our rather limited functional design, we have used our innate resourcefulness and creativity to employ objects to undertake these tasks. Our ancestors were hunter gatherers and somewhat nomadic and, in its broadest sense, packaging was needed to carry water and foods on journeys, to places of gathering / dwelling or for the storage of such items. Animal skins, shells, leaves and gourds provided basic tools for these items and plants such as grass and wood fibres could be woven to make containers. Packaging of products and foods, as we know it today, is a relatively recent phenomenon as, even a century ago, most consumers would purchase products and foods, in particular, on a little and often basis, usually as loose items from local shops. So, although the containers and baskets used to transport products were slightly more sophisticated than employed by our older ancestors, they served very similar purposes for transportation and storage over the centuries rather than as a protection for the product or for its durability.

Nowadays, with the growth in consumerism especially over the 20th century, packaging plays a much more extensive role in the product and food supply chain and well beyond its historical functional role. But, before embarking on the current uses of packaging, let’s just finish some of the history of the different types of packaging and, if history is your thing, then have a read of these two wonderful articles, one in words and the other in pictures. Paper, from tree bark, was first used as wrapping by the Chinese in the 1st and 2nd century B.C., but it wasn’t until the mid-1800s when paper from pulp became available that the first commercial paper bags were made in Bristol, England. Glass making pre-dates paper by centuries with the Egyptians being amongst the earliest to make and use it, although widespread use as containers was essentially only made possible with industrial low-cost production in the late 1800s. Metals have been used as containers for thousands of years throughout the bronze and iron ages although the toxicity of many of the heavy metals used, generally precluded its use for food. Food industry use was accelerated by the development of technology to sterilize foods in tin cans by Nicolas Appert in 1809, a development reportedly in response to a prize offered by Napoleon Bonaparte of 12000 Francs for a technology to preserve foods for his army. Of course, tin and aluminium, the latter first entering the market in the 1950s, are now widely used, especially across the food and drinks sector. Finally, plastic, the newest and now the most common type of food packaging, was a development of the 1930s and 1940s with widescale use from the 1950s, including polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylene, cellulose acetate and polyethylene teraphthalate (PET).

 

What is packaging?

OK, now we know a bit about the history of packaging, how is packaging defined and what are its uses? The European Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste states that “Packaging shall mean all products made of any materials of any nature to be used for the containment, protection, handling, delivery and presentation of goods, from raw materials to processed goods, from the producer to the user or the consumer.” Packaging is generally referred to as primary (sales unit), secondary (grouping of sales units) or tertiary (transport) packaging and these definitions are detailed in above Directive and, in simpler forms, in industry standards including the BRCGS Global Standard Food Safety and the BRCGS Global Standard Packaging Materials.

Packaging has many uses, some of which are listed below, and serve to highlight the importance of it to our industry;

  • Protection – arguably the most important function of packaging is to protect the contents from damage, contamination (microbiological, chemical, allergen, infestation and foreign objects) and environmental deterioration (drying, moisture, sunlight, heat).
  • Containment – packaging plays a key role in preventing the spillage of contents especially liquids including hazardous materials. It also provides a means to prevent inappropriate access to a product e.g. knives or tamper protection.
  • Presentation – preserving the look and feel of the product during transportation and display is essential and packaging is carefully designed to achieve this e.g. shrink wrap, flow wrap, trays, pouches, etc.
  • Preservation – the nature and choice of packaging plays a key role in the shelf life of products. Examples include light transparency that can significantly impact colour stability in consumer products and food and gas permeability that affects oxidation and rancidity of many foods. Active and intelligent packaging that enhance the foods they contain by extending shelf life or providing information on the condition of the food are increasingly available.
  • Identification – the design of a pack can be intrinsically linked to the identity of a product and the packaging also provides a means to deliver branding, labelling, traceability, handling and usage information.
  • Space optimisation – packaging is a key enabler of efficiency in display and transportation through optimisation of design to deliver packing and stacking efficiency.

 

Packaging – technical considerations

The extensive use of packaging does introduce a number of less favourable elements that it is important to remember. Microbiologically, packaging often serves to extend the shelf life of foods by protecting the food from contamination and by reducing or removing the presence of oxygen, thereby slowing / stopping the growth of many spoilage microorganisms such as moulds or aerobic bacteria. But packaging can also serve as a source of contamination to products, particularly foods and sensitive consumer products such as cosmetics and toiletries, introducing potentially pathogenic or, more often, spoilage microorganisms such as yeasts and moulds. Indeed, this specific risk is recognised in the BRCGS Global Standard for Packaging Materials Standard where a hazard analysis and risk assessment (HARA) is required to determine the specific risks, controls and monitoring programme. Packaging can also introduce a number of chemical hazards associated with the migration or leaching of chemicals from the container, seal, adhesives or even ink to the product. Examples include phthalates used to improve flexibility of packaging or efficacy of seals and certain types of plastic such as polycarbonates made with bisphenol A.  Consequently, legislative controls apply to either restrict the use of certain chemicals and also to limit the maximum permissible migration of chemicals into the foods. Notwithstanding the use of packaging to protect products from external physical contamination, the packaging can become the source of foreign bodies in or on the products including from the packaging manufacturing process itself. An especially useful industry guide on foreign body prevention and detection including consideration of packaging materials has been published and additional information on physical hazards is also available from Safefood 360°. Packaging can also present allergen risks, sometimes as a consequence of poor controls during packaging manufacture, but, more often, through its inappropriate use. For example, sacks and containers for raw material transport can often be re-used and if the risk of cross contamination between allergen and non-allergen containing raw materials is not properly assessed and managed i.e. through the use of dedicated bags / containers, this can present significant allergen risks when re-used. This risk together with others associated with the agricultural supply chain are comprehensively covered in a guide from the Allergen Bureau. Likewise, a common reason for allergen related product recalls in food is as a result of packing a product into the wrong packaging (or packing the wrong product into packaging) and strict procedures to ensure that the correct packaging is used for a product together with associated quality control checks are key to avoiding this all too simple error. These days automated online packaging recognition systems are available to reduce the potential for such issues.

 

Third party assurance

The safety considerations associated with packaging highlighted above are managed through the development and delivery of effective product safety management systems (PSMS) and underpinned by a hazard analysis and risk assessment approach. The very nature of packaging as an ‘ingredient’ necessitates safety management systems at the packaging manufacturer and its supply chain together with the manufacturers down the supply chain using the packaging. A PSMS supports a systematic approach to identifying hazards, defining controls, ensuring the controls are operating effectively and constantly reviewing its overall adequacy. Software solutions such as Safefood 360° can also be extremely helpful to support the management of packaging allowing safety, quality and legality considerations to be assessed and controls implemented. A number of organisations provide comprehensive standards that can underpin the PSMS including BRCGS through its Global Standard Packaging Materials, Global Food Safety Standard and Global Standard Consumer Products. The BRCGS Global Standard Packaging Materials, whose scope includes packaging for food, consumer products (including hygiene-sensitive products like cosmetics), packaging raw materials and even some single use disposal items such as plates and cutlery, if using the same underpinning technology, is designed to specify the product safety, legality, quality and operational criteria that must be in place within a packaging manufacturing organisation. Like all of the BRCGS Standards, traceability is key consideration and this features heavily in the packaging standard. An important component of a PSMS is audit to ensure consistent adherence to specified requirements and this is best achieved through a combination of internal and independent third-party audit. Third party audits to the BRCGS Standards can be certificated if conducted by an approved certification body and subject to demonstration of compliance to the specified requirements by the business. Voluntary third party certification is often specified by purchasers in the supply chain as a minimum requirement of supply. BRCGS is a GFSI-recognised certification programme owner (CPO) and the Packaging Materials Global Standard is one of a number of BRCGS Standards that have been benchmarked against the GFSI benchmarking requirements. An extremely useful feature of third-party certification schemes is that they generate a wealth of insight into non-conformities across the global supply chain. Such insight can help technical managers and safety professionals understand areas of potential weakness, where additional focus in their own business could pre-empt similar non-conformances before they occur. A review of the non-conformities arising from audits against the BRCGS Global Standard Packaging Materials in the past 12 months is shown in Figure 1.

 

Packaging and the environment

The impact of packaging on the environment is not the focus for this article and this aspect is comprehensively covered in other texts. However, a recent IGD report estimated that 3.5 million tonnes of primary packaging was placed on the UK market in 2019, 45% of which was glass, followed by plastic (28%), paper and card (17%), steel (6%) and aluminium (4%). The need to reduce the environmental impact of packaging is clear and the food industry has a key role to play in its responsible use. The EU has published extensive rules on packaging and packaging waste, including design and waste management (EU Packaging Waste).

Summary

I hope I have managed to nicely package up some thoughts and provide a few links where you can delve into greater detail about something that is so much taken for granted but is such a fundamental part of a product – it’s packaging. On that note, I will call it a wrap for this article (sorry about the puns, I couldn’t help it) and hope to see you back next month when I will share some insights on a different topic.

   

Author

 

Alec Kyriakides

BRCGS International Advisory Board Chair

Independent Food Safety Consultant