March: Nestlé to develop its guidance note on packaging adhesives
Nestlé was looking to develop its guidance note on packaging adhesives for suppliers this year.
The announcement came as Alison Ingle, group packaging manager, Nestlé International, spoke about packaging safety and compliance and challenges for the food industry at the Packaging Innovations tradeshow at the NEC in Birmingham.
“We will be releasing the guidance note to our suppliers this year because adhesives aren’t covered fully in terms of the current regulations,” she said.
“There are some substances in that, that are of concern and we want to be clear in terms of our strategy.”
According to Ingle, Nestlé has a multilateral approach to its packaging safety and compliance; at the supplier level it refers to its GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) guidance, where it builds technical partnerships with key suppliers and conducts safety audits.
At development level there are specifications and key requirements it has for its packaging and certificate of compliance; and, at the factory level it conducts pallet analysis, certificate of analysis and surveillance.
“It’s very important we have a multilateral approach to manage safety and compliance. We need to have a good relationship between suppliers and manufacturers in sharing information on the development side and at the factory level,” she added.
“Packaging is a necessity and we need it to protect our products and to communicate with our consumers. We want to ensure it gets from A to B through the supply chain but with packaging comes some risks, such as ITX (Isopropyl thioxanthone) and BPA (Bisphenol A).”
Ingle said to manage those risks there are guidelines such as the EU plastics regulation and the Swiss regulation on inks.
“No packaging material is inert, there are chemicals within our packaging that we need to consider and it needs to be safe for our consumers,” she added.
“There are various challenges at different points across the value chain. We have chemicals such as monomers, pigments, antiox, UV-stabilisers, solvents, these all get billed together to create our finished packaging and gets put to use with our food products, therefore there is an interaction between the two.”
Nestlé carries out a safety and compliance audit with its suppliers with trained internal auditors from its packaging development team to ensure the right certifications are in place, such as ISO 22000, PAS 223, BRC-lop, DIN EN 15593, and it is GMA safe.
In terms of development or changing a product, it has a set of requirements that go beyond current regulations in Europe, according to Ingle.
“We have 26 standards within those requirements but we also have our own banned compounds such as ortho-phthalates, no BPA, restrictions on styrene (max 500mg/kg pack), minimum quality of max 600mg/kg mineral oil in recycled board and guidance notes on printing inks,” she said.
