I have worked in the packaging workshop for eight years, and the most common thing I hear from customers is: "Environmentally friendly materials are not reliable to use" and "They are said to be degradable, but they will deform when they are touched by oil and soup." These complaints were like thorns in our hearts until the EU certification letter was delivered to the factory last week - our degradable starch-based packaging materials, which we have been struggling with for three years, finally won the food contact material (FCM) certification stamp!
This story started three years ago. At that time, several old customers who made pre-prepared meals came to the door and said that the environmentally friendly packaging they used either softened when exposed to heat or leaked when containing high-fat foods. A boss who makes frozen dumplings said honestly: "If you can come up with a material that can withstand both steaming and boiling and can be directly buried in the soil to decompose, I will buy all 20 production lines in my warehouse for you!"
The R&D team is really going all out this time. Most of the biodegradable starch-based packaging materials on the market are either not strong enough or have to add plastic components, but we don't believe this. Last fall, I stayed up all night in the laboratory to adjust the formula. When I tried the 47th sample, I found that using a specific proportion of plant fiber as the skeleton can make the material as stable as an old dog at minus 20¡æ to 120¡æ. The most important thing is that this material can be thrown into the compost bin and turned into black soil in three months. Even the inspectors from Germany gave a thumbs up.
How strict is the EU food contact certification? The light migration test is divided into four media: acid, alkali, salt and oil, and the heavy metal residue standard is accurate to one part per million. Those days, the young men in the quality inspection department were so tired that they ran to three international laboratories with 30 kilograms of samples. Now, looking at the whole row of "compliant" words on the report, workshop director Lao Zhang patted the filling line and laughed: "In the future, when we put plastic wrap on fresh meat, we don't have to worry about plastic film pollution!"
The goods supplied to a fresh food platform in the Yangtze River Delta last month are the best example. After their instant salad bags were changed to our starch-based food packaging, there was no more bag breakage and leakage during refrigerated transportation. The most amazing thing is that a consumer buried the empty packaging bag in his own flower pot, and two months later, small cabbage really grew - this incident was made into a promotional video by the customer and played on loop for three days at the exhibition.
Now is the peak season for mooncake factories to prepare stocks, and several time-honored brands in Guangdong have lined up to change the packaging line. A master who has been making lotus seed paste for 30 years said honestly: "I always felt guilty when using plastic trays before, but now this starch-based material feels warm and has a faint wheat aroma after steaming and baking, which is worthy of traditional craftsmanship."
Standing in front of a desk piled with EU certification documents, I remembered the joke of "taking over the entire production line" made by a customer three years ago. Suddenly, I felt that we are not just making containers for packaging, but also building a line of defense for the safety of the tongue. Next time you go to the supermarket and see a food box with the word "degradable" printed on it, you might as well take a closer look - if there is our factory's logo hidden at the bottom of the box, you can safely put hot soup and frozen ice cubes in it. This small piece of packaging material has withstood the most stringent test of the EU!
