The shelf-life dilemma

Depending on your individual background, you are probably quite well aware of the complexity behind the best before date of a product.

It starts in the development phase of your product, playing with ingredients and processes to achieve exactly the product characteristics you have been looking for. Then you check the products acceptance with consumers. Yay, they like it!
Then it’s time for shelf life tests. And here’s where the packaging comes in. It is normal that every natural product will change and at some time deteriorate.

Still, in most cases, the objective is to get a shelf life that’s as long as possible. This makes sense, because a longer shelf life has many advantages such as:

• less waste
• easier supply chain processes
• higher volumes sold during promotions

It sounds quite logical to go for a shelf-life as long as possible, right? But let’s challenge that perspective a bit.

The longer the shelf life, the more products are bought when on promotion (at a lower price, lowering your brand’s perceived value if it happens to often!) and stocked until the aroma eventually does fade or at least change. The longer the shelf life, the higher the needs for barrier and therefore less easy to recycle structures because it takes multimaterial packaging to achieve the desired 24 months or more (by the way also a cost factor!). The longer the shelf life the lower the reactivity for changes, having to wait up to years for validations. The longer the shelf life, the higher your invest in stocks. The longer the shelf life, the lower certain nutritional qualities…

As a packaging company, our highest aim is to protect and preserve your products with exactly the characteristics you have chosen for them. At the same time, we are committed to D4R packaging. 

So this puts us in a dilemma! How could we get out of it?

How about going new ways? Why not bring in your marketing team? Let’s talk about freshness, about intense aromas, about the original taste of the natural product, about… here’s where you come in! Let’s open the discussion and rethink things that have become normal but maybe do not need to be that way.

We can’t wait for you to get in contact!