Ensuring products reach the consumer in the best possible shape is an ongoing challenge for the chilled goods supply chain, where paperboard packaging is constantly exposed to fluctuating humidity, causing it to absorb moisture and eventually fail. This results in costly product losses.

Scion’s packaging team hopes it’s got the problem all wrapped up with a new high moisture barrier coating that increases the lifetime of paperboard packaging in humid conditions. Applied over the ink, the coating also provides a high level of gloss that protects package branding and offers good scuff resistance, maintaining the visual impact of a product right through to the end user.

“Package failure in the chilled goods supply chain is a big issue,” says Lou Sherman, Research Leader for Packaging. “It’s difficult to measure exactly what percentage of product is lost due to package failure, but it’s enough for moisture barrier performance to be on most exporters’ wish list of packaging requirements.”

Key to its success is that the coating is applied using the industry-standard flexographic printing process and enables multiple thin layers of coating to be applied, which reduces both the total volume of coating required and the costs incurred.

The coating technology has been successfully tested at Karlstad University in Sweden at pilot scale, and trialled on a commercial flexible printing press in New Zealand. Scion’s new printing press makes it possible to conduct further trials in-house, with packaging performance able to be tested in our purpose-built coolroom box compression creep facility, which simulates conditions in the chilled supply chain. These facilities are available for commercial testing.

For further information
Contact Kate Parker