Flexible Food Packaging

Fresher food through sustainable high-performance flexible packaging

Polyethylene

Markets & Applications Flexible Food Packaging

Approximately one-third of all food produced globally is wasted each year. According to the USDA, American consumers waste about one pound of food per day per person. High performance packaging keeps food fresh longer, and out of the trash. Our resins are the building blocks that give flexible packaging the performance properties it needs for maximum shelf life.

Applications

Proteins

Proteins

  • Meat and poultry
  • Cheese
  • Seafood
Dry Goods

Dry Goods

  • Snack foods
  • Carton liners
  • Slug wrap
Fresh Foods

Fresh Foods

  • Baked goods
  • Fresh produce
Other Applications

Other Applications

  • Frozen food
  • Bag-in-box
  • Liquid Packaging
  • Deli bags and wrap

Resins and expertise for demanding food packaging requirements

Sustainability and e-commerce are transforming the packaging landscape. Our products and film design expertise help our customers make packaging that extends shelf life and ultimately reduces food waste. Products focused on seal, barrier and lamination all help ensure package integrity to prevent contamination and spoilage, which are vital for surviving the demanding e-commerce supply chain.

We work closely with our customers to help their flexible packaging meet sustainability goals through greater recyclability, the incorporation of more recyclate into high-performance applications, and the elimination of excess packaging – all with the goal of moving to a more circular plastics economy. Our BONFIRE® film development platform, an online suite of tools, can speed product development time by helping customers identify promising multilayer film structures that meet sustainability, abuse-resistance and other performance requirements.

We have an extensive slate of LLDPE, HDPE and LDPE resins for every layer of a flexible film, from butene LLDPE for less demanding applications or bulk layers to hexene LLDPE for added toughness and octene LLDPE whenever a superior balance of stiffness, toughness and sealability is needed. We offer HDPE for barrier resins and LDPE for blending. Our top line of bi-modal octene LLDPE and HDPE products, specifically designed to excel in the most demanding applications, are enabled by our proprietary Advanced SCLAIRTECH® technology. Together, these resins provide the properties needed for the range of food packaging requirements:

Moisture Barrier

Our HDPE resins protect dry goods such as cereal and crackers from moisture, enabling them to stay fresher longer.

For medium to high moisture barrier, learn more about our SCLAIR® 19A, 19C and 19K offerings. 

Get best-in-class barrier – 50 percent lower moisture vapor transmission rate (MVTR) over standard high barrier resins – with SURPASS® HPs167-AB for blown film applications or SURPASS® HPs667-AB for cast film and extrusion lamination.

PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT

SURPASS® HPs267-AB Resin

Meet our next-generation, best-in-class moisture barrier polyethylene, HPs267-AB. This innovative resin delivers up to a 20% increase in water-vapor transmission performance in multilayer coextruded film structures compared to our SURPASS HPs167-AB resin. Better barrier performance enables longer shelf life and helps advance the circular economy by enabling replacement of metallized or PET-laminate non-recyclable films with recyclable, PE-based designs.

Learn more

SUSTAINABILITY STORY

Material Savings Through Rigid to Flexible Conversion

Flexible films use up to 75 percent less material than cardboard — and up to 97 percent less than glass. Stand-up pouches and other flexible formats made with our resins enable goods like rice, soups, nuts, and other traditionally rigid packaged foods to transition to flexible packaging. Less material usage translates to decreased emissions, less waste going to landfill, and transportation cost savings. We work with converters and brand owners to help them identify and develop flexible film replacements for rigid packaging that reduce material consumption and carbon footprint while delivering on performance requirements.

Seal

Our octene LLDPE sealant resins offer a broad seal temperature window for robustness, consistency for dependable operation on high-speed packaging lines and durable seal properties for package integrity.

  • For proven performance, learn more about the SCLAIR FP120 series. A workhorse product with secondto-none performance, it’s considered the best sealant in its density category. Time and time again, film producers and film converters depend on this resin, known as the cleanest resin with the best organoleptic properties.
  • For low seal initiation temperatures and faster sealing, learn more about SPs116-C.
  • When versatile seal performance is required, our VPsK914-A and VPsK914-C products offer best-inclass sealant properties. They seal faster, while maintaining seal strength and hot tack of higher density products. They also provide higher blown film rates and unparalleled optics.

Abuse Resistance

We offer several octene LLDPE food packaging resins with an exceptional stiffness-toughness balance for abuse resistance that helps preserve package integrity during handling and transportation, reducing food waste. While critical for every load, this balance is doubly so for consumer e-commerce food deliveries. Consumers expect theirmeal kits and other online food purchase shipments to arrive fresh and undamaged; our resins protect the food throughout the extra handling steps, all the way to the consumer’s door.

  • SCLAIR FP020-D, a proven performer.
  • SPsK919-C/F, considered amongst the toughest polyethylene resins in the industry. 
  • VPsK914-A/C, for a winning combination of toughness and seal performance.

SUSTAINABILITY STORY

Recyclability

Emmerson Packaging, a flexible packaging company based in Nova Scotia, has long been focused on sustainability in their operations and in their offerings. Recently, Anita’s Organic presented them with a request to design a fully recyclable, durable stand-up pouch including a seal/reseal zipper made of the same material. The pouch is used for organic flours, grains and baking mixes, but was being sold in a non-recyclable paper package with a plastic liner. In addition to recyclability, the new packaging needed to perform just as well as their existing bags, preserving the flavor, nutritional value and freshness of the products within.

When Emmerson approached NOVA Chemicals to work together on the package design, we answered. Challenge accepted.

The Emmerson and NOVA Chemicals teams joined together in designing and prototyping an all-polyethylene multilayer film structure solution using our barrier and other performance resins. Today, all of Anita’s Organic products use the all-PE, recyclable plastic packaging. Learn more about the story and application here.

See the Case Study

Shelf Appeal

For brick-and-mortar shoppers, products that stand out from the crowd on the shelf win. Several of our food packaging resins offer excellent optics with high gloss and low haze.

  • Butene LLDPE: NOVAPOL PF-Y818-FX, PF-Y818-BPX and PF-Y818-CPX for outstanding optics and improved melt strength for higher blown film processing rates.
  • Octene LLDPE: SPs116-C for outer skin layer films that require high clarity, lower haze or a glossy finish.

Lamination and Multilayer Film

Our resins are well known for low defects, and our at-line quality assurance programs help ensure that they’re the most consistent, defect-free in the marketplace, making them the ultimate choice for lamination.

  • Butene LLDPE: Our NOVAPOL PF-0118 series delivers consistent quality that works in a broad range of lamination films.
  • Octene LLDPE:  Our SCLAIR FP120 series products are a mainstay in lamination film. With excellent consistency, they add a superb balance of toughness, sealability and processability.
  • For seven or nine-layer barrier films including Nylon and EVOH, SURPASS FPs016-C is a great companion. This resin supplements high- performance nylon co-extrusion and is ideal as an interior layer tie concentrate blend resin in high-barrier thermoforming webs. Learn more.

PRODUCTS IN USE

Tetra Pak

When Tetra Pak set out to create Tetra Evero® Aseptic, the world’s first aseptic carton bottle for ambient white milk, they struggled to find a resin for the neck of the bottle that had the oxygen barrier properties needed for enriched dairy alternatives, flavored milk, and toddler and baby milk. NOVA Chemicals SURPASS HPs667-AB resin made it possible. 

Tetra Pak had searched for some time to find a resin with the properties required to store dairy products beyond ambient white milk at room temperature throughout the supply chain. Then they learned of NOVA Chemicals new high-barrier resin. 

Experts from NOVA Chemicals Centre for Performance Applications worked closely with the Tetra Pak team to qualify HPS667-AB to meet the carton bottle’s performance requirements and ensure it would stand up to the product’s complex, unique production process and the use of pigmented resins.

“Using NOVA Chemicals HPs667-AB resin, we are able to expand into some of the best-performing categories in the global dairy market, such as flavored and vitamin-fortified milk,” according to Tunc Turkmen, Product Director Tetra Evero Aseptic at Tetra Pak.

Tetra Pak

Download the product infosheet to learn more about HPs667-AB resin’s unmatched barrier and stiffness performance.

Download Now