Manufacturers of food products often confront a unique challenge, and that is, making their product flaunt an innovative and appealing look to the consumers. Not only this much, ensuring that the product always remains fresh and fully preserved makes the job more challenging. For years, food suppliers across the globe have been having limited choices in what they can do with high class packaging, until recently.
Needless to say, most grocery shoppers today want all the food products they shop to be as convenient and easy as possible. This has posed a large number of challenges to the makers of food products, particularly those requiring a little bit of cooking or some other type of instant preparation before being eaten. But now, new advancements in the field of packaging have begun to revolutionize the entire marketing and merchandising of preserved food products.
With the emergence of ultra advanced flexible packaging materials like metallized film and high barrier film technology, food manufacturers now have a large number of new packaging options, which until recently they used to have only a few. For instance, pouches made from specialty film combinations make it positively possible for common consumers to buy rice already cooked and ready-to-serve, whereas in the past they used to cook the rice themselves.
The reason all this is possible now is because of new-age retort technology, and advanced manufacturing process which begins by filling and sealing a flexible pouch, and then batch while retorting it thru a thermal process which cooks and sterilizes the product and the package as well. In the end, the package is still stable enough to be placed on a shelf, but without any bulkiness and waste material of the glass containers or metal cans that were once heavily utilized to house products of this nature.
Some prominent technical specifications of Metallized Films–
- Vapor deposited metals: Al, Zn, TiO 2, and the like
- Metal film thickness: 3 nm to 100 nm
- Base material thickness: 1.5 µm to 100 µm (base material type PET)
- Substrate length: 40,000 m (metal Al), 5,000 m (metal TiO 2)
- Film forming process: roll-to-roll
- The base material at trial production can be formed in a shape of sheet.
Retort pouch technology along with lap sealable film is the right answer to a growing consumer demand for convenient and easy to handle and use products which save time while eliminating excessive waste. Some manufacturers in India have started using pouches which contain no aluminium, making it quite safer for end users to heat up the package in a microwave oven. Indian manufacturers have earned a formidable reputation in both national and international markets offering films par excellence to serve a variety of purposes.
