Many food and beverage manufacturers have committed to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs, stating specific goals around lowering emissions, addressing sustainability across the supply chain, reducing product and packaging waste, and providing a more inclusive workplace.
Hormel Foods is one of those companies focused on ESG and making a positive impact on the world. With over 20,000 employees and over 40 manufacturing facilities providing products to 80 or so countries, the company has a real responsibility that must be tracked — which it does. Known for its many brands, including Planters, Skippy, SPAM, Hormel Square Table, Justin’s, Jennie-O, and more than 30 others, the company recently released its 18th Global Impact Report, highlighting areas of the organization where continuous improvement and responsible business practices made a difference in 2023.
To measure its accomplishments, Hormel set 20 qualitative and quantitative goals it expects to achieve by the end of 2030, tracked by a program it calls the “20 by 30 Challenge.” While it covers many ESG angles, from a sustainability perspective, there’s an effort to cut back on nonrenewable energy use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water use, and solid waste sent to landfills.
Another top priority in the sustainability category: Reduce packaging.
A deeper look at package design
A key highlight of the company’s 2023 progress includes reducing product packaging by nearly 1.7 million pounds. According to company officials, this was accomplished by optimizing packaging design and improving shipping efficiencies.
An example is the redesign of the Planters brand plastic bottle with a projected annual savings of 440,000 pounds of plastic, along with tweaks to avoid any issues with the recycling cleaning process. This follows work in 2022 when the Hormel engineering team redesigned Justin’s peanut butter jars to use 30% less plastic, which will amount to over 165,000 pounds of materials saved annually, the company said. The packaging for Hormel Square Table entrees was also redesigned to include 25% of material from post-consumer recycling, saving over 382,000 pounds of material annually, and the thickness of the board for Jennie-O ground turkey boxes was reduced, generating over 1 million pounds of material savings annually, according to the company website.
When redesigning packaging where “less is more,” the idea for the change may come from Hormel’s R&D packaging team, a supplier, marketing, or even a customer request, but implementing the change is a collaborative effort, which includes machine builders.
“They are integral to the success of many of these projects,” said Oliver Ballinger, senior scientist, packaging R&D at Hormel Foods, in an interview with Packaging OEM. Working with packaging engineers and the production team, new designs are tested on the packaging line and OEM feedback is provided on how changes perform on the equipment.
The design engineers utilize CAD and different 3D and simulation software for strength comparison of sustainable materials, Ballinger explained, noting examples of weak points on a bottle or digital top load strength. But much of the change comes from the creative solutions — the “what if” questions asked by engineers that lead to the ultimate solution.
The “what if” simulations can be done to determine where material distribution needs to be to maximize the strength of a bottle and accurately portray what the strength will be once bottles are physically produced, Ballinger said. “Without that technology, or with inaccuracies in that technology, it adds time, complexity, and cost to need to physically produce trial molds for bottles to be manufactured and tested just to find out they didn’t meet the strength requirements or had quality defects.”
When new materials are used, they go through evaluations, including barrier, abuse, machine runnability, shelf-life, etc., before they become viable. After successful completion of those evaluations, the material goes through a series of pre-commercialization tests before full approval. If new equipment is utilized, a parallel path of factory acceptance testing (FAT) occurs with the equipment.
Food waste factors in
New sustainable designs are not only focused on reducing packaging waste but also food waste.
“We don’t want to make a sustainable packaging change and have that change drastically reduce the shelf life of the product and therefore result in more food waste,” said Ballinger. “The same goes for proper package and product sizing. If we find out that consumers struggle to eat through a one-pound package of lunch meat and product consistently gets thrown away, then we need to look at making that package smaller to fit the need of the consumer.”
New equipment can be brought in pending the kind of product changes and equipment capabilities. “But in general, we try to make changes that work on current equipment,” said Ballinger.
As a result, OEMs always factor into the sustainability equation to make the necessary changes required on existing — or new — equipment.
