Looking for new, sustainable and environmentally friendly packaging concepts for fresh fruits, vegetables and mushrooms.

Along with 500 cooperative affiliated growers, the Dutch company supplies and distributes a complete, fresh, year-round assortment of fruit, vegetables and mushrooms to (international) supermarkets and wholesalers. Sustainability has been a key part of their strategy for years. Every step they take is based on the growing consideration for people and the environment, and is aimed at creating a healthier world, both today and for future generations. In this context the company also examines their packaging activities and they continuously strive to come up with new sustainable forms of packaging. However, many different interests and conditions play a role here: - Packaging has a number of functional demands: protection, communication, portioning and extending shelf life. - Compatibility: new forms of packaging have to be compatible with the current product line, packaging machines and transportation flows, or may only require minimum adjustments. - Scale-size: new types of packaging have to be commercially available on a large scale. - Price: margins in the sector are low and consumers aren’t willing to pay (a lot) extra (yet) for more sustainable forms of packaging. So the costs of new packaging solutions have to be low. - Consumer perception: next to being actually sustainable, new forms of packaging also have to be perceived as sustainable by the consumer. The company has access to a large national and international market, possesses its own logistic channels and has a lot of experience and knowledge about packing fruit and vegetables. However, they currently do not have all insights in the packaging possibilities so that they can fulfill all the demands as mentioned above. The company is looking for new, sustainable and environmentally friendly concepts, technologies and solutions so that they can create one or more packaging concepts of the future together. Cooperation with partners would be in the frame of a manufacturing or a technical cooperation agreement but also other types of collaboration can be discussed. IMPORTANT: This Technology Request refers to an open innovation challenge published on an internet platform. If an organization expresses interest before closing date, it will be guided towards this open innovation platform. After registration participants can browse free through other submissions and engage in discussions. All submissions will get feedback by the company on this open platform. The challenge closes on April 26th, 2019. Mind that posts on this platform are not confidential. Beside open discussions on the platform, sharing of confidential information will be made possible on demand. After that, the firm will select the SME's with whom they would like to cooperate in the development of a solution. Once the challenge is closed, Expressions of Interest for this technology request will be treated in the traditional way.