Packtin

Scenario

At a very particular time for our planet, within which agriculture has a significant impact on the environment, including problems such as deforestation, water pollution and loss of biodiversity. A large amount of food is wasted due to unsustainable farming practices and inefficiencies throughout the food chain. In fact worldwide, about 14 percent of the world’s food, worth $400 billion, is lost on an annual basis between harvest and the retail market (FAO, 2019). At the same time, an estimated 17 percent of food is wasted at the retail and consumer level (UNEP, 2021). Reducing food loss and waste is a significant lever for broader improvements in our food systems toward enhancing food safety, quality and sustainability and increasing efficiency.

Description

Packtin is an Italian company created to address the problem of wasting vegetable by-products from food processors; they propose reusing these resources to create new products and raw materials, thus upcylcing, aiming to recover 15,000 tons of by-products per year by 2025. Using a low-temperature drying process, they quickly remove water without degrading more delicate compounds such as flavorings and antioxidants, resulting in high-quality vegetable flours. A portion of the flours later continue the production process and undergo physical-mechanical extraction with green chemistry to obtain fibers and bioactive compounds. Packtin has set the goal of using their natural extracts for the creation of coatings and biodegradable and edible food films that can increase the shelf-life of fresh produce.

The production process is circular because it recovers from food processors what is treated as an unwanted by-product, destined at best to be delivered to biogas plants (Doria & Buonocore, 2021). They turn it into a co-product, enhancing it 100 percent: making a new raw material that can be fed back into the food market. The process is environmentally sustainable because both the stabilization and extraction plants are designed to consume as little energy as possible, thanks to the synergy of different technologies. In addition, water and solvents are recovered and reused, creating a zero-waste plant (Sanseverino, 2021). They also take care to check the work of their suppliers; the most important requirement is that they also manage what they previously considered a waste or at most a by-product as a co-product, that is, a food product in its own right, according to the dictates ofHACCP, to ensure the quality and safety of the finished product. They also conduct internal audits to ascertain the quality and safety of incoming co-products. Two of the values that guide Packtin on a daily basis are the highest nutritional quality and food safety.

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