Amcor equips Configeo with NIR recyclable ready meal trays

Amcor has developed a three-compartment ready meal tray for Cofigeo, a French food manufacturing company that specializes in ready meals and canned foods. The tray is produced using a near-infrared (NIR) detectable terracotta masterbatch, enabling effective identification by NIR sensors in recycling facilities to support material recovery and circularity.

The tray is made from lightweight monomaterial PP, which is suitable for collection and reprocessing in France’s recycling infrastructure. 

The solution will be used to package five French and Italian style recipes from the William Saurin Mon Trio Gourmand range, each featuring meat or fish, a starchy food and a vegetable. Keeping the three main ingredients separate enables consumers to choose whether to mix them when the meal is eaten. 

“Consumer reaction to the tray has been very positive,” says Benjamin Margerand, William Saurin’s marketing product manager. 

“The freedom to keep separate or mix the three recipe components has proved popular, and the tray is practical enough to enable consumers to eat straight from it. Indeed, in pre-launch testing, depending on the recipe, up to 80% of consumers said they were planning to eat directly from the tray. The color has also been well received.”

Enhancing material usage and shelf life

Amcor designed the ready meal tray to allow for compartments of different measurements that consider the ingredients’ sizes, textures, and densities. 

The tray also meets Cofigeo’s requirements to be suitable to run on existing filling lines, de-stackable, retortable, provide an effective oxygen barrier, and ensure ease of use.

“This was a challenging project, especially given its shape, to make the tray as thin as possible, but thanks to the technical support of Amcor, we have managed to achieve the same wall thickness as our standard single-compartment version,” explains Jean-Michel Perquin, Cofigeo Group’s Packaging R&D manager. 

“Despite the number of different ingredients across the five meals, all are filled efficiently on the line.”

The multilayer PP tray incorporates a barrier that delivers over 12 months of ambient shelf-life for the five meals.