A British company, 3BSolstar, has for the first time produced commercial quality food trays and punnets from a British grown source of raw material, utilising the fibre residue left after sucrose as been extracted from the sugar beet tuber.
BeetaPac sugar beet packaging fibre is a natural material certified food safe for direct contact packaging of human foodstuffs.
3BSolstar’s research and development team has succeeded in obtaining patent protection, and the company is now able to manufacture and sell bespoke food contact grade complex shape products throughout Europe, the UK and North America.
The company will use the latest press to dry forming technology to set up a state of the art manufacturing facility to produce trays and punnets from the BeetaPac material.
According to the company, based near Manchester, the UK produces around half a million tonnes a year of sugar beet pulp – the remains after the sugar has been extracted from the tuber – which is usually sold as low-nutrient animal feed.
As well as being “competitively priced” compared to similar products, the advantages of BeetaPac as a packaging raw material are that it is sustainable, with a carbon footprint typically 40-50% lower than that of PET, it does not take land from agricultural use, and it is compostable and recyclable “as if it were a paper product”.
www.3bsolstar.com
