Updated: 30th March 2020 11:00AM
As we know, the global situation with coronavirus is very dynamic, which means the severity, and therefore the Australian National and State Government response can change within hours.
So, stay tuned as we update you as to what the food industry can expect going forward under COVID-19 and months ahead.
Packaging is everywhere in our lives – we use it to carry things, store items or preserve products like food. Its ubiquitous presence has only increased further in the las few years – and yet most of us don’t even notice when we use and through away a plastic bag or cardboard box.
In 2018, China initiated their National Sword Policy, banning foreign waste from being exported to China that had over a 0.5% contaminant. As the global standard for waste contaminant is 1.5%, this basically prevents most waste from being sent. For instance, a plastic bottle that still had a label or lid attached would not meet the criteria. This was the last, and most stringent, of a number of policies that have been working towards the phasing out of this system since 2013.
Viking Food Solutions have been working with Kaczanowski & Co. Premium Quality Gourmet Smallgoods for a number of years, providing design and packaging solutions for a wide range of their smallgoods & product offerings.
In 2018, Coles and Woolworths took the initiative to ban single use plastic bags in all their stores across Australia. From the first, it was a polarising decision. While environmentally conscious groups and customers hailed it as a great step in the right direction for achieving sustainability, many of the supermarket giants’ other customers disliked this new policy.
If you’ve been to your local supermarket in the past few months, you may have noticed a new type of product has begun to be sold in large quantities. Ready made meals used to be fairly basic offerings of frozen pizza or sausage rolls, a few microwaveable trays with nondescript contents tucked away in a corner.
Now, the ready-made meal section in the local supermarket can take up a whole cabinet, and is filled with incredibly diverse, high quality meals from all cuisines and for all occasions.
In Australia, we’re experiencing a society that’s becoming ever-more environmentally conscious, a government that’s just starting to regulate in this area, and the loss of our get-out-of-jail-free card in China’s refusal to accept any more of our waste. Recycling our overload of packaging has become one of the biggest issues in Australia right now.
Consumers and suppliers alike are starting to become concerned about their obligations under these new rules. But what differences will the push for recyclable packaging make for both these parties?
While we may consider the immediate danger and loss these have caused serious enough, it is scary to realise that the long term consequences of this virulent bushfire season may be even more serious.
Several Coles customers recently took to social media expressing their frustration when trying to open their meat purchased from the large supermarket chain which was wrapped in vacuum packaging, claiming it is too difficult to open and poses as a safety hazard.
