Gualapack’s Pouch5 wins 2021 Best Packaging Prize in Italy

The Best Packaging contest, promoted by Istituto Italiano Imballaggio, is Italy’s key INNOVATIVE packaging solutions event from prototype to market.

This year, the initiative renewed its determination to foster sustainable and ethical innovation in the field, with the support of Fondazione Carta Etica del Packaging and the introduction of ten values for the future of packaging. These are reliability, balanced, safety, accessibility, transparency, informative, contemporary, forward looking, educational, and sustainability.

Meant to encourage companies to work and innovate towards the common goal of ethical and sustainable innovation, these were the criteria used to shortlist this year’s 27 products from leading and pioneering Italian companies including Gualapack.

Gualapack was selected for two products: Pouch5, a flexible, mono-material stand-up pouch, recyclable as polypropylene within existing PP streams; and Tethered Cap, which offers a significantly lighter, litter-reducing cap solution for flexible packaging in advance of the European SUP directive’s application in 2024.

Pouch5 won in the ‘Balanced’ and ‘Safe’ categories. As a global player in flexible packaging, Gualapack is determined to make a positive impact by putting sustainability at the heart of its mission.

Pouch5 is the first-ever high-performance, monomaterial, flexible spouted pouch designed for infant nutrition, fruit purees and other shelf-stable, pasteurised food. This means it offers convenience and ease of use, as well as the added benefit of recyclability.

Pouch5 uses the same technologies as the multilayer, multimaterial laminates and pouches typically used for food packaging, but replaces traditional raw materials with more sustainable alternatives for collection, sorting and convenient recycling.

Furthermore, Pouch5 boasts a smaller carbon footprint compared to similar solutions made with a traditional laminate structure: it contributes to an estimated 34 per cent reduction in GGEs due to the use of materials that have a lighter impact than PET and aluminium.