New Zealand's food and beverage industry has embraced food waste and sustainability education from The Australian Institute of Packaging (AIP) at Foodtech Packtech this week.
A half day training course on The Role of Packaging in Minimising Food Waste was held on Wednesday, and a seminar on Fighting Food Waste, Save Food Packaging and Sustainable Packaging Design was held on Thursday, and were both fully subscribed, according to organiser, AIP executive director Nerida Kelton.
The training course, which was fully booked, covered packaging design criteria for Best-Practice Save Food Packaging Design developments, with hands-on and practical case studies.
"It is a full course, and we had all of the leading manufacturers from New Zealand sending their staff because of the importance of this issue," Kelton said.
Packaging consultant and AIP life member Keith Chessell, who led the training course, described the strong interest from the NZ food and beverage industry as extremely encouraging.
“Safe food packaging brings a whole new dimension to innovation, in areas such as portion sizing, resealability, emptyability and intelligent control,” Chessell said.
The AIP and industry partner Packaging New Zealand jointly presented the Thursday seminar which discussed ‘Packaging and the Circular Economy’ to a full house.
The seminar covered the Australasian Recycling Label, the PREP tool and looked at how to incorporate Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle and the Circular Economy approach into packaging design.
“The AIP was very happy with the level of interest in such important issues, and we hope it's the start of many conversations,” Kelton said.
