Industry
Renewable materials
Revenue
€8.6B
Employees
23,000
Countries
50+
About
One third of the food produced globally is lost between production and consumption. Stora Enso, a leader in renewable packaging, is looking for innovative material providers to help fight that issue together with advanced renewable and recyclable food packaging solutions, which would sufficiently preserve their contents, but also enable recyclability or reusability of the packaging materials.
Theme description
Food packaging solutions must fulfil a demanding but crucial task in preserving foodstuffs in grocery store shelves, take-away boxes and home delivery bags. At the same time, recyclability of food packaging materials is increasingly important for Stora Enso, its customers and consumers. Stora Enso is already combating these issues by providing a wide range of fiber-based food packaging materials to replace plastic materials.
We want to avoid the pressure on scarce natural resources even more by bringing the shelf life and safety of sustainable packaging to the level of fossil-based ones. While fossil-based materials are still prevalent in the market, there is an increased interest to reach a maximal renewable fiber-content in packaging for full recyclability, yet food safety regulation, competition between distribution chains and recycling sector capabilities limit the opportunities.
The Packaging Materials division at Stora Enso provides high-quality renewable materials based on both virgin and recycled fiber to promote circular economy. Our wide selection of barrier coatings enables demanding use cases for our packaging, including perishable foodstuffs. We want to reduce the amount of fossil-based components in packaging materials without compromising high protection and performance to address our customers’ needs.
Opportunity overview
Our goal is to protect, preserve and promote our customers’ products with our materials while allowing for environmental sustainability and cost effectiveness. Bioplastics or materials consisting of up to 95% of cellulose fiber are examples of promising material solutions for sustainability, but fossil-based barriers are still more widely used due to their price, protection, availability and converting efficiency.
We are looking for bio-based barriers or monomaterials for renewal packaging that would enable a high level of food protection. In addition, sustainability and food safety can also be improved by other means, such as circular packaging or smart solutions for food condition tracking. To summarize, we are looking for cooperation partners that have innovative ideas in the area of renewable packaging materials or barriers, new circular packaging concepts or smart layers in food packaging materials. Read a few of our examples below bearing in mind your solutions may go above and beyond them, or even be something completely different.
Focus Areas
Examples of solutions we’re interested in
Bio-based materials for packaging
We want to replace fossil-based components in food packaging, whether they are monomers, barriers or sealing materials. The material solutions would need to fulfil food safety regulation but also be recyclable and/or biodegradable. Use cases in the food packaging industry differ from flexible packaging to home delivery of greasy foods, so bear in mind that we are looking for a broad variety of solutions. You do not need to be able to provide an entire packaging solution either - we are happy to co-create sustainable packaging offerings using our existing materials and your solutions combined. Do you have something to offer in the field of food-safe, functional and sustainable packaging materials?
New concepts for circular packaging
Single-use packaging is growing in importance especially due to food delivery and take-away. We want to find solutions for reusable or recyclable/compostable delivery packaging, with access to production and existing solution for end-of-life. We are looking for both packaging concepts and business-to-consumer reuse business models. What do you have to offer to this challenge?
Smart layers in food packaging
The functionality of packaging can also be improved through smart add-on solutions that. We want to make it easier for the supply chain and consumer to further increase the shelf-life and quality preservation of sustainably packed food and believe this can be achieved with innovations that are integrated into our renewable products. How would you solve this challenge?
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