After a long media hiatus on biopolymer announcements, it seems PepsiCo is ready to come out and once again take the biopolymer challenge. The company generated a lot of good/bad/funny publicity in 2009 when its subsidiary, Frito Lay, launched its new Sun Chips compostable packaged bag, which turned out to cause louder noise than the original bag. Pepsico redesigned the compostable bag with a new adhesive to help reduce the noise. From what I read in past news, Toray Plastics was the company who worked on the development and supply of the film used to make the compostable Sun Chips bag.
Lessons learned from this (as reported by the SPI’s Summer 2016 Plastics Market Watch):
- Try big changes on smaller brand first
- Persist through initial setbacks
- Poke fun at yourself to defang your critics
PepsiCo and PHA producer, Danimer Scientific, have announced an agreement this week to develop biodegrable film resins to meet the sustainable flexible packaging requirements of PepsiCo’s global food and beverage business. The agreement reportedly builds on a long-standing relationship between the two companies that included development of bio-based compostable packaging for PepsiCo’s snack brands, and will facilitate the expansion of Danimer Scientific’s Nodax PHA plant.
The collaboration is also expected to help expedite PepsiCo’s transition to packaging that is completely biodegradable for their snack food portfolio by incorporating Nodax PHA bioplastic into certain of its next-generation snacks packaging.
We have been covering the PHA market for quite sometime now at Tecnon OrbiChem’s Biomaterials newsletter. I have to ask my colleagues what’s the market volume and value for polymer films in snack packaging.
