Packaging

PICTURE THE FUTURE OF PORK

Thursday 23. July 2009 - On June 3-4, Packforum - Sealed Air’s customer care centre near Paris Charles de Gaulle airport - organised an event dedicated to pork production, packaging and marketing. 70 attendees representing 42 companies from 21 European countries reviewed the latest developments in the pork industry and the rapid evolution of packaging towards more efficient and attractive presentations.

They also discovered recent technological innovations, including Cryovac Mirabella compact packaging system, and advances in automation such as the PakFormance system.

Perspectives for the pork industry
The EU’s primary pork processors face pressure from retailers, consumers and importers. Christophe Lafougère, Director of the GIRA consultancy, opened the series of presentations at the event with a detailed exposé of drivers and brakes in the EU pork markets. Consumers in general are spending more on leisure, electronics, etc. and less on food. The global pork market, which is already 65% larger than beef’s, will continue to grow faster until 2015 – but most of this growth will come from China.
“The current crisis is good to pork,” Christophe Lafougère pointed out. “People are downtrading from beef to pork and poultry.” However, after the sky-high food prices of 2008, even pork producers will witness a business decrease this year.
On the one hand, meat consumption tends to increase with GDP/capita. On the other, advocacy groups and even governments in developed countries are encouraging people to eat less meat – and younger consumers seem to agree. Value packages and quality meats are both in favour, while the undifferentiated segment in the middle is under pressure.

Meanwhile, the primary processing industry is consolidating in Europe, going from fragmentation to concentration in years. At some point, European producers will have to face the competition from other regions, particularly Brazil. At present, only 0.1% of pork eaten in the EU is imported – but this is likely to change when the sanitary rationale for trade barriers becomes insufficiently convincing. Looking ahead, slaughterers and meatpackers are coming under increasing pressure to increase convenience, food safety and product differentiation, streamline logistics and manage prices, while improving environmental sustainability.

Infrequent pork consumers
Not everyone loves bacon. Richard Cullen, Development & Research Manager at the British Pig Executive (BPEX), reported on the attitudes of infrequent pork consumers in Britain. “Pork isn’t considered as versatile as chicken and not so much of a weekday treat as beef or lamb,” he explained. It’s often seen as old-fashioned, unglamorous, time consuming and sometimes fatty. And it doesn’t look good raw. “People have a very limited repertoire of recipes.”
In a survey of 880 households in the spring of 2007, BPEX found that 88% were quite or very satisfied with the overall eating quality of loin steak. Between 12% and 17% found their steaks fatty, dry, chewy and/or tough.
The current recession has at least one positive effect: people buy pork more often, feeling it provides better value for money than other meats, and are therefore compelled to test new recipes.
Elsewhere in Europe, the Danish Meat Research Institute found consumers have similar issues with pork. “Teenage girls and young women generally think that pigs are dirty animals and that pork is fatty – and dry when cooked,” explained Project Manager Lene Meinert. This latest complaint is directly related to consumers’ tendency to overcook pork. The industry needs to warn consumers against overcooking: the core temperature should be between 65°C and 68°C.
Thanks to crossbreeding programs, Danish pork’s intramuscular fat is now mostly under 2%. Some cuts are leaner than chicken. On the other hand, more “marbled” meats are also juicier when cooked – another key expectation of consumers. Shoppers are also sensitive to the improvement in appearance and tenderness provided by quality packaging.

China: where the growth is coming from
Pork is the primary source of protein in Asia, Sealed Air Asia’s General Business Manager Li Xin pointed out. Asia is the main growth driver of the global pork industry: China alone imported an estimated 740 billion tonnes of pork in 2008.
And like many things in China, pork consumption habits are changing fast. The traditional “wet market” (unpackaged cuts) still accounted for most purchases just a few years ago but is expected to drop below 10% by 2016.
The industry still faces many challenges in the region, such as the consumer habit of “fresh”, provincial trade barriers, food safety problems and “mini-breaches” of the cold chain.

Practical and profitable: the case for Case Ready
Case Ready meat (i.e. cuts that arrive in stores in ready-to-sell packages) offer European retail outlets an average net margin of 22-23%, compared to backstore meats’ 14-15%. Case Ready pork’s market penetration has reached 65% and sales are growing 10% per year.
Christophe Gottar, Cryovac Food Solutions’ Marketing & Retail Director Europe, presented the results of a store check conducted in early 2007 across 140 stores of 50 retail chains in 15 EU countries. “Based on the collected data, we estimate that the Case Ready penetration of pork has doubled in eight years.”
Despite multinational producers’ increasing market share, presentation varies greatly from country to country. Modified Atmosphere Packaging dominates almost everywhere, but shoppers are more likely to find vacuum-packed pork in northern Europe and ambient presentations in the South. In Norway, Finland, Poland and Spain, more than two thirds of supermarket Case Ready pork is sold under an industrial brand, while in Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and the UK, almost all cuts are no brand or retailer brands. Packaging colours and use of vertical display also vary considerably.

Ban the knives: Metro Cash & Carry Hungary goes for Case Ready
More and more retailers are turning to case ready meat as a means of increasing their margins and improving logistics. Laszlo Dicse, the head of Ultra Fresh at Metro Cash & Carry Hungary, detailed the Zero Knife policy his company gradually implemented between 2006 and 2009.
Unpacked meat’s shelf life was too short for Metro Cash & Carry Hungary, while the skills/cost ratio of backstore butchers was not attractive. “With Cryovac Darfresh, we get a longer shelf life, which is very important for our trade customers,” Laszlo Dicse explained. “Consumers, on the other hand, are on the lookout for reliability, safety and quality, and these portion-packed products are reassuring to them.”
The company also uses the packages as an information channel, with printed skin packaging and colour-coding to improve the shopping experience.

How long can it stay fresh? Experience from the US pork sector
There are five key steps to maximizing pork’s storage life, said John Brook, the US Meat Export Federation’s Regional Director for Europe, Russia and the Middle East. “Keep it cold, keep it clean, remove essentially all of the oxygen from the package, prevent oxygen from re-entering the package and – at the retail level – provide an environment containing at least 25% carbon dioxide.”
The US exports a quarter of its hogs – so long-term conservation is essential. Carcasses are blast chilled at -20°C for 45 to 60 minutes and then always kept at -1°C. In addition to carcass scalding, surface trimming, steam vacuuming and hot water washing, US meat processors give their meats organic and non-organic acid washes – which are banned in the EU. Once vacuum packed, the cuts have a shelf life ranging from 28 to 50 days.

Learning new recipes: the case of minced pork
Even something as culturally ingrained as gastronomy is open to clever new ideas, judging by the success story brought from Finland by Snellman’s Marketing Director Peter Fagerholm. A famous brand in Finland, Snellman played the key role in popularizing minced pork, considered until recently a bottom-end, unbranded product. Though the Finns eat minced meat once a week on average, they were concerned about its origin and safety. Snellman capitalized on its brand credibility to launch a range of fresh, vacuum-packed, “real minced meat” in Cryovac packaging, supported by a major advertising campaign. Its minced meat sales jumped by 35%, with 10% more customers buying.

Green pigs: improvements in sustainability
Farm animals account for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a FAO report of 2006, Livestock’s Long Shadow. Though pigs produce less methane and other GHGs than ruminants, the pressure is on producers to clean up their act. Part of the solution can come from crossbreeding programs, said Dr. Grant Walling, Director of Research & Genetics of JSR Genetics Limited. Since the 1960s, the number of pigs weaned per sow has increased by 50% (to 21) and the lean meat weight produced per tonne of feed has doubled to 170 kg. JSR’s experimental pigs do even better. Now genetic research could factor environmental imperatives into the selection process.
Packaging plays a part in sustainable food production. Packaging is actually part of the solution, not the issue. Almost a third of the food produced in the world never gets eaten; households especially end up throwing out too much of the food they buy. By extending shelf life, good packaging reduces the need to bin food. Innovative packaging systems aim to reduce their environmental impact, with lightweight products such as thin and flexible plastic alternatives to rigid containers. Reduced headspace products such as Cryovac Mirabella make optimal use of transportation and storage capacities, reducing their carbon footprint. In addition, manufacturers are introducing ovenable packaging based on starch materials and bio-based or recycled plastic materials.
Food safety remains of course the prime concern of everyone in the industry. Dr Carol-Ann Wilkin of the University Bristol presented her department’s research into the use of anal plugs for pigs in slaughterhouses, which significantly reduces the contamination of the meat by excrement and hence the risk of salmonella.

Cryovac Mirabella to extend meat’s shelf life while increasing its attractiveness
The problem with conventional Modified Atmosphere Packaging is that the meat turns brown if it touches the film – and shoppers shun it. Meatpackers leave a big headspace between the cut and the top film. Even so, retailers cannot display the package at too steep an angle or the meat would slide and bunch up against the film.
Cryovac Mirabella solves this dilemma. In a breakthrough innovation, it adds a second film, while a pressurized mix of 80% oxygen and 20% carbon dioxide keeps the meat an appetizing bright red. The pack is much smaller and it can be stacked vertically.
Feedback from supermarket shoppers surveyed in France is overwhelmingly positive: the vertical display catches their eye and the meat looks fresh to them. The compact package fits nicely in their fridges and doesn’t clutter their bins as much.
For retailers, the benefits are obvious: on top of the better saleability, they can fit up to 60% more packages per crate and gain as much shelf space too. Cryovac Mirabella improves the entire value stream, minimizing the cost of materials, production, transport and storage.
Cryovac Mirabella is one of Sealed Air’s recent innovations to extend meat’s shelf life while increasing its attractiveness. Other options include Darfresh Bloom, the ultimate combination of vacuum skin packaging and modified atmosphere packaging (MAP). The vacuum skin packaging hermetically seals its contents, reducing purge, encouraging meat maturation and offering opportunities for vertical display, while MAP offers bright product colour, prolonged shelf life and a flat lid stock surface for printing.

Introducing full automation
Modern meat processors take a systemic view of the whole line flow: slicing, batching, packing, labelling, palletizing, storing and dispatching. For best results, automation efforts should address all aspects – avoiding the so-called “islands of automation” with small armies of operators at either end.
Automatic slicers such as MFS’ Opticut use horizontal blades to pre-batch slices of boneless pork, with an output of 80 to 100 slices per minute. It pre-positions the batches for loading onto trays. Coupled with a packing machine, this system typically reduces the need for staff from 4-6 to 2. It also scales back giveaways from 5-7% to just 1%. And with no handling, the risk of contamination from workers’ gloves is eliminated. Similar slicers are in the pipeline for bone-in meats.
Smart loaders such as the Cryovac ULMA FLOW-VAC HFFS system can handle products of varying length – as long as they fit in bags of the same width. With automatic indexing and merging, two loading lanes can be connected to a single vacuum machine.
Providing global control over the line flow, Sealed Air’s PakFormance software monitors and manages every stage in the process, issuing alerts on screen, by sms or other preferred method when particular events happen.
In the fully integrated farm and slaughterhouse of a food processor, in the Commonwealth of Independent States, improvements in automation – with Sealed Air as the primary partner – will boost production from 1 million pigs this year to 3 million in 2010. The site will use PakFormance Visualization, PakFormance Production and PakFormance Advanced to monitor key equipment and processes, improve productivity, optimize packaging, manage batches and orders, conduct remote maintenance, and take traceability and reporting to the next level.