In the fresh fruit business, flavour is everything and packaging can play an important role in delivering taste to the table. PKN spoke to Roger Turner, GM of Piñata Farms about the company's approach to packaging.
In the heart of pineapple country, on the Sunshine Coast in south-east Queensland, you'll find the HQ of family-owned and operated Piñata Farms on the site of its first pineapple farm founded in the 1960s. Today the company has its own and third party farms in productive growing regions around Australia to bring pineapple, mango and strawberry varieties to Aussie households all year round.
For general manager Roger Turner, fundamental to the company's success is its focus is on delivering “good eating product” and achieving this consistently, he says, is what will underpin future growth.
Key to this delivery is getting product to retail in top condition, and that's where packaging comes in. The company uses a variety of clear PET punnets for strawberries sourced from Chinese company Multisteps and fibreboard trays for its pineapples and mangoes, sourced from Orora and Visy.
One of the biggest challenges, Turner says, is to come up with packaging that is functional but not over-engineered.
“The packaging needs to complement the product,” he says.
Turner gives the example of a strawberry punnet the company developed for smaller sized fruit that is produced when weather conditions are less favourable.
“We developed a 90g 'snack pack punnet' designed to fit in the corner of a lunchbox and as an on-the-go snack option for office workers. The pack suited the smaller sized fruit which would not have been marketable in regular punnets."
The packs were trialled in major retailers and were successful for a few seasons but have since been discontinued. Turner believes that the concept came to market before the on-the-go trend had fully hit its straps and that there is still scope to develop similar snack pack options.
“Convenience is definitely a driver for innovation,” he says, “but not every idea is a success."
Another short-lived idea was a purpose-built pouch to fit three small mangoes. It was trialled but didn't take off.
“But the important thing really is to continue to try, because we want to encourage our regular customers to eat more fruit, and new customers to trial it.
Another driver for new packaging development is product integrity, specifically tamper evidence.
“We're looking into adapting our punnet format to add tamper evident features,” he says. “We're also taking extra measures to mitigate risks of contamination at source."
“Retailers are understandably very sensitive about foreign body contamination, and for this reason we've invested in the latest checkweighing and metal detection equipment (from A&D weighing) at our packing facilities,” he says.
Looking ahead, Turner says the company will continue to invest in packaging.
“Whether it's a convenient snack pack, or an attractive display tray that protects the fruit, if we can make the consumer's choice more straightforward through packaging, if we can harness its persuasive power to bring or flavour to their table, than that has to be the way to go.”
