As a premium food-service supplier, our Singaporean converter customer demands the best from their material suppliers and their products. To support their search for a lighter weight alternative to the solid bleached board (SBS) they had been using for a lunchbox product, Metsä Board put its R&D and packaging analysis and design expertise to work.
"Our customer's packaging design is for food consumed on the go, so every box needs to both meet stringent safety standards and properly protect the contents," explains Brent Singer, Technical Services Manager for APAC, Metsä Board. "The goal of our combined service approach was to identify exactly the right premium paperboard product and the grammage to meet their exacting specifications."
Thorough expert analysis ensures a lighter lunch
The team at Metsä Board's Excellence Centre in Äänekoski, Finland conducted a thorough packaging analysis that would provide the data needed to recommend exactly the right premium paperboard for the job. "We wanted to find the lightest possible grammage to reduce raw material use while ensuring that the packaging design would perform as expected, especially in terms of the stiffness value," says Satu Wallenius, R&D Engineer at Metsä Board.
In this case the packages were manufactured by the customer following their normal converting process and then sent to Metsä Board for analysis. Part of this process was compression testing to collect and analyse data on the failure points of the packaging to ensure that Metsä Board's experts could recommend the optimal grammage.
"The results of our analyses allowed us to recommend a slightly different grammage of Metsä Board Natural FBB, which would provide the needed strength for both variants of the packaging design – one with internal dividers and one without," explains Singer. Compared to the SBS they had been using, switching to MetsäBoard Natural FBB would potentially allow the customer to use 10–15% less board to manufacture the same number of lunchboxes.
Singer is keen to emphasise the added value of Metsä Board's unique approach, especially for customers in Asia: "This is a highly competitive, price-sensitive market, and our approach sets us apart from the competition because it takes us beyond being a mere paperboard supplier," he says. "By combining our technical and R&D services we can provide hard facts to help customers make better procurement decisions as one unified team."