Designing safe products for the circular economy

Packaging plays a fundamental role in protecting food. It guarantees food safety and hygiene, helps prevent food waste and gives access to food by supporting easy and efficient delivery.

At Huhtamaki, we want to become the first choice in sustainable food packaging solutions, and we believe that transitioning to a circular economy is the key to unlocking sustainability. In this transition, the change starts from our product design and innovation, and is reflected throughout the entire life-cycle of our products. We value digitalization as a major driver to achieving circularity, for example by enabling materials to be correctly sorted for recycling, and have therefore incorporated digitalization in our strategy to help achieve our sustainability ambitions.

Designing for circularity offers exciting opportunities to develop new packaging solutions to address the needs of our society. However, we are also clear that when making choices in the product design phase, for example regarding the choice of materials or the structure of the packaging, there can never be a compromise on the safety and quality of the final product that is to be used in food contact. Product safety is non-negotiable and managing food contact safety is at the core of our sustainable packaging solutions for food.

Our ambitions related to circularity and product safety are as follows: