Ferrero’s Packaging Strategy in 5 Points

26 Feb 2013

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Ferrero, a leading Italian food brand owner, works on the constant improvement of its packaging, which it considers an essential component of product quality.

Ferrero, a leading Italian food brand owner, works on the constant improvement of its packaging, which it considers an essential component of product quality. As Ferrero explains: "Packaging has to protect the product, preventing deterioration, preventing breakage, contamination and tampering, in order to maintain intact the fragrance and the taste experience months after production."

Ferrero uses many materials for its packaging: paper and carton, plastics, glass, aluminum. In line with its philosophy it has developed a strategy called '5R', which aims to produce functional and environment sustainable products. 5R stands for the 5 points of the strategy, each beginning with 'R'. They are: removal, reduction, recyclability, reuse and renewal.

Removal is the process of subtracting superfluous components from the packaging to save, for example, tons of plastic.

Reduction consists in eliminating materials or redesigning the packaging to reduce the weight and avoiding the waste of material or using resources in a rational way. Also in this case many tons of plastic are saved every year. Ferrero says: "With regard to bakery products, in the last years, we have reduced the thicknesses of packaging films for individual pieces of snack foods and saved materials by about 20%. We also have reduced the banding in PP and the thickness of the sheet of polystyrene (PS) that separates the two levels of chocolates in a box of Rocher, thus saving 10 tons of PP and 20 tons of PS."

Recyclability aims to use materials which can be recycled or to choose only one material instead of two or more to simplify the differentiation of packaging for recycling. Moreover, Ferrero uses recycled PET for secondary packaging. With regard to the percentage of recycled material in Ferrero's packaging of the last years, carton (compacted and corrugated) is the most recycled, followed by PET and glass.

Reuse is packaging that can be used again, such as Nutella's glass, or Ferrero Rocher's packaging.
Renewal refers to the use of materials derived from renewable sources and biodegradable materials. E.g. Ferrero prefers to substitute polystyrene (PS) with carton packaging. The objective of Ferrero for 2020 is a larger use of materials from renewable sources, such us biomass materials or biopolymers, thanks to research of centers and universities.

Another important role Ferrero's Packaging has is informing customers about the disposal of packaging after its use. Since the beginning of this year Ferrero's product labels have been reporting the type of material used in the packaging.

In addition, the company has set the goal, to be achieved within the next year, of only using paper from sustainable virgin material sources or from recycled paper.

Source: Ferrero