AIP-Competence Platform

Fresh food: a growing challenge

A significant trend witnessed in numerous regions worldwide is the change of customers’ expectations regarding food quality. Trends of converting to lighter food can be observed, and growing customer concerns are experienced regarding preservatives, additives, microbial contamination and nutrient deterioration due to processing, storage or transportation conditions. Driven by these tendencies, customers now turn more and more towards fresh food with little intervention in its raw materials.

However, prevailing food supply chain practices, especially those in Europe, are less than optimal for massive replenishment of such products and may constrain the trade of fresh food to limited localities. Remedies, however, do exist, and are already applied in some regions of the world. The solutions boil down to two essential principles:

• Using special packaging that protects perishables and makes them last longer without altering the product itself; and
• Enabling food replenishment processes to work more efficiently, such as by improving throughput, reducing time lag, and reducing spoilage losses with more flexible handling measures.

Terms typically mentioned in connection with such measures are:

• Active packaging, i.e., packaging that actively interferes with adverse processes (e.g., oxydation or growth of decomposing microorganisms) without altering the composition of the food itself;
• Intelligent packaging, i.e., packaging elements (typically labels, indicator fields) that provide more exact information about the actual state of the food than a fixed expiry date (and thus allow safer and more flexible handling of perishables); and
• Track-and-trace systems that can keep track of what is currently happening to a product and what was occurring in the past, thereby providing credential information about expected quality and allowing improved material handling procedures (e.g., quick stock reallocation decisions or leaner recall actions).

Europe presents special demands

Active and intelligent packaging solutions have become commonly accepted practice is regions like Japan or the USA. Now that European consumers are also turning more and more towards fresh food, the European food industry is also trying to respond—and promptly experiences difficulties in adopting technologies that already proved their worth in other regions. These obstacles can be traced back to more critical expectations and a different legislative framework:

• Production and replenishment of food are dominated by SMEs in Europe. The practices of large-volume supply chains of other regions may prove unsuitable as SMEs have limited resources to invest in new technologies and have sporadic access to expertise needed for their adoption, not to speak of the heterogeneity inherent to small-business conglomerates.
• European regulations are not well-prepared for direct adoption of packaging techniques used in other regions. Some solutions, such as separate sachets with agents, are currently not permitted in food packaging, requiring either the elaboration of suitable technologies or the reassessment and modification of corresponding regulations.
• European consumers may be very critical about certain technologies of high-performance food supply chains, the more so as local trade of fresh food often remains a popular—and reasonable—alternative. Especially in Western Europe, consumers are growing conscious about products with less health risks and no excessive environmental threat (as shown by the almost unanimous rejection of improperly tested or toxine-emitting genetically modified crops). The poor financial situation of many Eastern European consumers makes them extremely price-sensitive. Chances are that this will limit the Eastern European market of packaged fresh food to a narrow range of premium products for a considerable time.

Working on remedies: the AIP-Cornet project

Started in September 2009, the two-year European R&D project AIP-CORNET (Active and Intelligent Packaging Competence Platform) aims to overcome the aforementioned burdens by two types of efforts exerted in parallel:

i) The channeling of vital information especially to technological stock holders, prospective users and standardization/legislative bodies. Aside from gradually building a knowledge base, especially meant for prospective users of the technologies, ongoing consultation with the concerned groups ensures all parties involved are provided with up-to-date information on recent advances.

ii) Elaboration of new technologies that better suit the European conditions of application. Relying on comprehensive knowledge of European needs, consortium members are elaborating both packaging and tracking solutions that will fit the application conditions in Europe.

The consortium of AIP-Cornet joins a wide range of expertise, as it includes stock holders from the packaging and food industry, R&D partners in chemical/biochemical research, as well as members with IT expertise and SME-friendly tracking resources at hand.