Ready-made meals and sauces with high fat content and strong colours often have an undesired side effect on the packaging – they leave stains. As an attractive appearance and long shelf life are two key factors in Convenience Food, Mondi set out to find a solution for this problem. The result is a new retort packaging that ensures highest barrier properties whilst sustaining opacity and enabling high-quality designs.

Pouches have gained more and more importance, as they are convenient, safe and attractive packaging solutions for the food, pet-food and non-food sector. Eye-catching appearances at the point of sale are mandatory to successfully differentiate from competitors in the market. Trendsetting designs nowadays contain widespread white areas or light colours, presenting challenges for retort packaging. Mondi accepted this challenge and came up with an innovative material concept, offering customers excellent barrier and filling properties as well as a stainless appearance of colour intense products.

“The growing demands of the convenience food market have triggered several innovations in packaging in recent years. We are proud to present a sophisticated retortable anti-staining pouch to our customers and the market”, Stefan Gutheil, Managing Director, Mondi Consumer Bags, states. “A major advantage of this innovation is that it can be filled and processed in the same way as standard pouches. The special laminate not only guarantees highest safety and mechanical resistance but also offers an additional feature – it ensures the straight and easy tear-away opening of the pouch,” he proudly explains and states, “this innovation completes our portfolio of pouch solutions and thanks to our experienced team of application engineers and development managers, Mondi takes a pioneering position in providing its customers with this novel solution.”

The special material structure has excellent barrier properties, for instance, against oxygen transmission. Throughout the retort process, the laminate retains its attractive appearance and prevents grease stains and discolouring – even with white designs. Thanks to the high opacity an attractive visual appearance is guaranteed during the entire shelf life of the product.

“The novel material structure also enables a clean and straight tearing of the pouch, which is especially advantageous with sauces. Subsequently, the anti-staining-pouch is the ideal packaging solution for ready-made tomato, curry or chilli dishes with high fat content and intense colours as well as the pet food industry,” Stefan Gutheil concludes.