FrieslandCampina

Challenge

As one of the world’s largest dairy companies, FrieslandCampina aspires to build a leading position in sustainability and set the standard for the dairy industry.

Product packaging plays an important role in the environmental performance of the company’s products. Design and material choices can have a profound effect on a product’s footprint, dictating the end-of-life options available as well as the packaging’s potential to manage food waste.

As such, improving the environmental performance of its packaging is a key priority within FrieslandCampina’s sustainability strategy. To drive its sustainable packaging vision, the company decided to develop a science-based ecodesign tool to support its packaging design team in making sustainable design decisions.

Insights

For ecodesign efforts to meaningfully influence the design process, companies need both robust metrics and internal buy-in. It was critical for FrieslandCampina’s ecodesign tool to have both a solid scientific foundation and a user experience that would be intuitive for FrieslandCampina’s packaging designers.

Quantis’ extensive scientific background and solid web development capabilities (and previous experience producing customized packaging ecodesign tools) made Quantis an ideal partner to co-create this ecodesign tool and ensure it would provide maximum value to FrieslandCampina.

Actions

In a close collaborative partnership, FrieslandCampina and Quantis developed the RESPACKT tool — a science-based online assessment tool to measure, compare and monitor the environmental performance of single and multiple packaging as well as entire packaging portfolios. 

RESPACKT enables designers to assess packaging across multiple criteria, including carbon emissions, fossil fuel depletion, land use and recyclability, providing  a holistic view of environmental performance. The tool also measures the potential impact of packaging on food waste — a crucial and often neglected aspect of sustainable packaging design.

Quantis also developed a training, overview brochure and animated illustrated video to easily share and explain the Respackt tool internally and externally.

Impact

To ensure environmental considerations are fully embedded in design, FrieslandCampina has integrated RESPACKT into the stage-gate process of packaging development.

Using the tool to compare different types of packaging, the company can rapidly optimize and make improvements to design, such as eliminating unnecessary elements to facilitate sorting and recycling of packaging materials at end-of-life.

After the launch of RESPACKT, FrieslandCampina started right away to analyse the full global packaging portfolio. The insights from RESPACKT enabled them to properly prioritise and determine a sustainable packaging roadmap for the coming years.

The insights offered by RESPACKT will be invaluable in helping FrieslandCampina deliver on its ambitious sustainable packaging strategy and drive positive and meaningful change.

• Climate

• Food + Beverage 

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