UPM Specialty Papers and Polish flexible pack specialist co-design heat sealable food pot wrapper

19 Sep 2024 --- UPM Specialty Papers shares insights from its latest F&B partnership with Unipaco, a Polish flexible packaging materials converter. The specialists collaborated on a recyclable, heat-sealable salad and herb pot wrapper in two versions that combine UPM papers and Unipaco coatings.

“By combining our papers with an extremely thin PE coating, we set out to create a packaging that helped our customers both to meet their recyclability goals and also comply with all relevant regulations,” explains Kirsi Lahtela, senior manager for Product Portfolio Management at UPM Specialty Papers.

“The project provided Unipaco with their first opportunity to test our barrier base papers in addition to more familiar coated one side papers. We were delighted to see that UPM Solide Lucent performed perfectly on the coating equipment.”

The first version of the salad and herb pot wrapper is based on the barrier base paper UPM Solide Lucent 78 g/m2 with a 4 g/m2 PE coating. The strong and highly versatile barrier base paper offers a “unique natural look and feel.”

Proven to be particularly well suited to coating and lamination, UPM Solide Lucent provides an ideal surface for further converting and printing, including rotogravure. The “exceptionally thin” 4 g/m2 PE layer delivers required moisture resistance and heat sealable properties.

The structure also meets strict German 95/5 monomaterial requirements, with single-component materials accounting for 95% of the packaging mass.

Dual offerings

The second version pairs UPM FlexPack 80 g/m2 with a 4 g/m2 PE coating. UPM’s coated one side UPM FlexPack papers are designed for a wide range of lamination processes and offer strength and high-quality print results, especially on flexo printing.

This thin and heat sealable 4 g/m2 PE layer boasts heat-sealability and the correct level of moisture resistance.

“With growing demand for recyclable materials, we decided to focus on lowering the grammage of our coating to develop a unique product. Our goal was to create as thin a coating as possible while also maintaining quality, barrier properties and heat-sealability,” says Aleksander Borysow, CEO and chairman of the Board, Unipaco.

“By combining this coating with UPM’s papers, we achieved astonishing results that can be easily transferred to a full-scale production. This solution is available on many other papers and for numerous end-uses such as meat and cheese wrapping, flexible packaging and even sack production.”

Safe for food contact and compliant with recyclability requirements, UPM’s fiber-based salad and herb pot wrapper will be on display at UPM Specialty Papers’ booth at FachPack in Nuremberg, Germany, next week, and at Pack Expo in Chicago, US, in November.

Earlier this week, ProAmpac released an “industry-first” user-friendly online design tool to assist brands designing bespoke flexible packaging. The platform generates photorealistic prototypes, which can be downloaded for review or incorporated into presentations. Brackett’s Orchards utilized the program to design packaging for a new retail product, Brackett’s Best Apple Chips.