Single-Serve Milk Containers Offer New Consumer Appeal

Offering consumers of fresh milk a natural package for a natural product, single-serve milk bottles, caps and labels with a short shelf life of five to ten days can now be made with NatureWorks PLA from Cargill Dow LLC. This is a new marketing tool for the dairy industry’s efforts to boost sales and increase milk consumption. NatureWorks PLA packaging provides producers with the highly sought point-of-sale differentiation from the competition in the dairy case. 

Offering consumers of fresh milk a natural package for a natural product, single-serve milk bottles, caps and labels with a short shelf life of five to ten days can now be made with NatureWorks PLA from Cargill Dow LLC. This is a new marketing tool for the dairy industry’s efforts to boost sales and increase milk consumption. NatureWorks PLA packaging provides producers with the highly sought point-of-sale differentiation from the competition in the dairy case. It is the first family of plastic derived entirely from Midwest corn, which competes head-to-head with traditional plastics derived from petro-chemicals. "Dairy bottles made from a corn-based plastic, like NatureWorks PLA, offer consumers a ‘natural-in-natural’ product, which is a unique edge over the competition," said Jim Hobbs, commercial director for packaging at Cargill Dow. "By choosing NatureWorks, dairy marketers not only get that point-of-sale differentiation for milk, but also the key performance qualities necessary for single-serve applications. From our view, you can’t have one without the other." When it comes to performance, NatureWorks exhibits excellent gloss and clarity, as well as flavor and aroma barrier. It also molds into detail as well or better than PET (polyethylene terephthalate), and can be processed on conventional equipment at comparable processing speeds. Additionally, the bottles hold rigidity throughout their shelf life, making them visually and texturally appealing. All of these performance attributes make NatureWorks an ideal material for developing high-visibility packaging that helps milk get noticed in the display case. Since Cargill Dow uses corn instead of petroleum as a raw material, NatureWorks PLA requires 20 percent to 50 percent less fossil fuel resources than comparable plastics and fits all current disposal options, including being fully compostable in municipal and industrial compost facilities. Recently, Cargill Dow held the Grand Opening of their new, world-scale manufacturing plant approximately 20 miles north of Omaha in Blair, Neb. At capacity, the plant will produce more than 300 million pounds (140,000 metric tons) of PLA annually and use up to 40,000 bushels of locally grown corn per day as the raw material for the manufacturing process.