The Nestle Research Centre in Switzerland, is conducting an experiment which could see chocolate manufacturers reduce their packaging.
Nestle's scientists have been examining chocolate's sensitivity to elements such as moisture, oxygen and light in order to give more awareness of how degradation factors affect sensitive products over the course of their designated shelf lives.
Head scientist Robert Witik said the lack of precise data available, as well as the methods for gathering it, could lead manufacturers to overestimate the level of protection a product’s packaging needs to provide.
“Generally speaking, the higher the barrier a packaging material offers, the more complicated its structure and the greater its environmental footprint," he said.
“The more accurately you can predict a product’s sensitivity over a specific period of time, the more easily you can identify optimal packaging materials that will still keep it fresh."
Witik says there is almost no such thing as a perfect barrier when it comes to packaging.
“People may think no oxygen gets through plastic, for example, but different types of plastic are actually permeable to different degrees," he said.
"One of our goals here is to identify the critical point at which the amount of oxygen a product consumes begins to have an impact on its taste and quality."
In other words, how much oxygen does the chocolate bar need to react with before it goes off?
Test groups
Before they could begin their tests, Witik’s team had the painstaking task of wrapping each of the 700 individual chocolate bars in different packaging materials with varying properties.
“We divided the bars into groups and packed them under different storage conditions,” he explains.
“Some are wrapped in packaging with a high oxygen barrier, while others are wrapped in packaging with a low oxygen barrier.
“We’ve also adjusted the level of oxygen inside the packaging, so some bars have more oxygen between chocolate and wrapper than others.”
What doesn’t vary in this experiment is the light, which the chocolate is exposed to continuously, and at the same intensity.
“In normal circumstances the product would never be subjected to this much brightness,” says Witik.
“This is an accelerated situation.”
To discover exactly how much light the chocolate would see in reality, the team is conducting a parallel study that simulates its journey through the supply chain.
Every 30 days, they send a handful of bars from each group for another type of test, this time with sensory experts, to see if there has been any loss of quality and taste.
In the long-run, Nestle's findings should enable the company to calculate how much oxygen chocolate will consume when packed in a given material under specific conditions.
But the research is not only about chocolate. Witik and the team are already studying other products to establish a methodology that could be applied to Nestlé’s entire portfolio.
Their aim is to feed all the information they collect into a ‘shelf-life prediction tool’ they’re developing to help packaging engineers across the company to make more informed decisions about the packaging they select.
“Packaging materials can be very complex, with many layers performing different functions,” says Witik.
“So choosing the right material is a very technical process.
“We want to help our engineers take a more data-driven approach to what’s known as packaging ‘optimisation’, better matching the performance of packaging with a product’s actual protection requirements.”
Challenging convention
Providing packaging engineers with an improved means of selecting material to ensure a product’s quality and safety over a particular shelf life is one aspect of this research.
Challenging conventional wisdom is another.
The scientists are also trying to encourage product managers to question the duration of the shelf life they’ve assigned to a particular product in the first place.
Why? Let’s say a product is given a shelf life of 24 months, but in reality people consume it within nine.
The chances are it’s being ‘over packed’ in an unnecessarily high level of protection.
Shortening its shelf life, and adjusting its associated packaging requirements, can be a simple but highly effective way of improving its environmental performance.
Although at first glance, wrapping up 700 chocolate bars and leaving them on a shelf for months may not appear to be contributing to this target, the long-term gain is clear.
The closer Nestlé can get to predicting exactly how certain products will react to different conditions, the less packaging those products will require.
So while scientists may not have a formula for growing your own confectionery, they might have found a way to ensure the company's well-loved products are more sustainable in future.
Nestle's aim is to feed all the information they collect into a ‘shelf-life prediction tool’ they’re developing to help packaging engineers across the company to make more informed decisions about the packaging they select.
