18 PW DEC2021
FIRST PERSON
Own Brand Proves Paper-Pack Concept for Store Brands The fifth largest producer of tissue paper in the world, Sofidel in 2012 expanded beyond its established 13-country European footprint to enter the American market. Built primarily on selling into retail private label, the company recently launched a consumer brand of its own, one that existed in the U.K. as Nicky, to serve as a proof of concept and market testing brand for a unique paper pack solution for bath tissue and paper towels. Packaging World sat down (via Zoom) with Derek Dafoe, a Sofidel Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing, to learn more.
Packaging World:
Explain the genesis of Nicky, a new, own-brand complement to Sofidel’s U.S. store brand portfolio.
Derek Dafoe Nicky had existed in Europe before it came to the U.S. It does have a portfolio of products in poly-based packaging, and they launched into this new paper pack slightly before us. Nicky is not a traditional big brand play. It’s what we would call a B-brand in Europe, and it tends to be something that we do in smaller markets with smaller customers. In the United States, though, Nicky has never existed until now. The Nicky paper packs you see pictured on these pages is the first time we’re even seeing Nicky in the U.S. market. So we’re taking that brand that already existed, but making it more North American-friendly. Here, it’s focused specifically on sustainability, and specifically on the innovation around the product and the paper packaging format we’re using. That’s the groundbreaking difference here.
Then give us the genesis of the new paper pack. Most of Nicky’s legacy packaging was the standard poly-pack that you see when you’re dealing with standard consumer products—Charmin, Bounty, or other big national brands. But the real impetus to go to a paper pack was that Sofidel has a commitment around reducing plastic from its production by 50% by 2030, compared to 2013. One thing that’s a little different about Sofidel comes from our founders Giuseppe Lazzareschi and Emi Stefani—it’s a privately owned company. They’re honestly looking out for the future of the planet. It’s not so much about just making a product to meet a need, as much as it’s about making a product both to meet a need and also do something that’s giving back.
The fact that you make paper didn’t directly contribute to your opting for paper packaging, then? Some of that contributed to the decision, but it was also about changing our plastic format in a lot of our other areas. It wasn’t as simple as just
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saying, “Hey, we make paper. Let’s package the product in paper.” It really started about three and a half years ago, and the initial thought from our CEO Mr. Luigi Lazzareschi was, “well, we could wrap it in paper.” As it turned out, it wasn’t quite that simple to accomplish. But that literally was the environmental consideration: paper makes sense, it’s recyclable, we’re good at it, so we should be able do it. Then, of course, we had a hard time finding a packaging supplier that could actually give it to us in a format we could use.
What were the challenges that came with launching an all-paper pack for roll-based tissue products? Our initial tests reminded me of wrapping Christmas presents; if you wrap the paper too tight around the present, it pops around the edge, right? The result is puncture, then tear. We don’t want that in a retail brand, so we had to work on that. Then we’ve got to seal the paper pack at the seams. But all of our existing equipment used heat mold formers to melt what used to be plastic film together. That doesn’t work so well on paper, it tends to light it on fire. So, there were a lot of developmental issues around this project. But the main impetus was that we think paper is better for the environment and we really want to move away from plastic as much we can. So instead of trying different types of plastic that might incrementally improve our sustainability profile—post-consumer resins and such—we wanted to try and go all the way to a totally different substrate and see if we could do it. That’s what resonated in the paper pack.
OK, so no plastic at all? Company-wide, and in other applications I understand that Sofidel has taken measures to down-gauge plastic film thickness, for instance. But it sounds like you’re saying this Nicky pack moved away from plastic entirely. Is that correct? That’s correct. Nicky is a fully paper pack. It has a limited coating of a natural adhesive barrier—only applied in certain areas—to enhance the seal-ability of the package structure. But that’s not over the whole
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