HORMEL FOODS FACTORS INTO ITS SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY OEMs
Sustainability Report: Hormel Foods reduced packaging by nearly 1.7 million pounds in 2023
Many food and beverage manufacturers have committed to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs, stating specific goals around lowering emissions, addressing sustainability across the supply chain, reducing product and packaging waste, and providing a more inclusive workplace.
Hormel Foods is one of those companies focused on ESG and making a positive impact on the world. With over 20,000 employees and over 40 manufacturing facilities providing products to 80 or so countries, the company has a real responsibility that must be tracked — which it does. Known for its many brands, including Planters, Skippy, SPAM, Hormel Square Table, Justin's, Jennie-O, and more than 30 others, the company recently released its 18th Global Impact Report, highlighting areas of the organization where continuous improvement and responsible business practices made a difference in 2023.
To measure its accomplishments, Hormel set 20 qualitative and quantitative goals it expects to achieve by the end of 2030, tracked by a program it calls the "20 by 30 Challenge." While it covers many ESG angles, from a sustainability perspective, there's an effort to cut back on nonrenewable energy use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water use, and solid waste sent to landfills.
Another top priority in the sustainability category: Reduce packaging.
A deeper look at package design
A key highlight of the company's 2023 progress includes reducing product packaging by nearly 1.7 million pounds. According to company officials, this was accomplished by optimizing packaging design and improving shipping efficiencies.
Stephanie Neil Executive Editor
The redesign of the Planters brand plastic bottle resulted in a projected annual savings of 440,000 pounds of plastic.
packaging oem
An example is the redesign of the Planters brand plastic bottle with a projected annual savings of 440,000 pounds of plastic, along with tweaks to avoid any issues with the recycling cleaning process. This follows work in 2022 when the Hormel engineering team redesigned Justin's peanut butter jars to use 30% less plastic, which will amount to over 165,000 pounds of materials saved annually, the company said. The packaging for Hormel Square Table entrees was also redesigned to include 25% of material from postconsumer recycling, saving over 382,000 pounds of material annually, and the thickness of the board for Jennie-O ground turkey boxes was reduced, generating over 1 million pounds of material savings annually, according to the company website.
When redesigning packaging where "less is more," the idea for the change may come from Hormel's R&D packaging team, a supplier, marketing, or even a customer request, but implementing the change is a collaborative effort, which includes machine builders.
"They are integral to the success of many of these projects," said Oliver Ballinger, senior scientist, packaging R&D at Hormel Foods, in an interview with Packaging OEM. Working with packaging engineers and the production team, new designs are tested on the packaging line and OEM feedback is provided on how changes perform on the equipment.
The design engineers utilize CAD and different 3D and simulation software for strength comparison of sustainable materials, Ballinger explained, noting examples of weak points on a bottle or digital top load strength. But much of the change comes from the creative solutions — the "what if" questions asked by engineers that lead to the ultimate solution.
The "what if" simulations can be done to determine where material distribution needs to be to maximize the strength of a bottle and accurately portray what the strength will be once bottles are physically produced, Ballinger said. "Without that technology, or with inaccuracies in that technology, it adds time, complexity, and cost to need to physically produce trial molds for bottles to be manufactured and tested just to find out they didn't meet the strength requirements or had quality defects."
When new materials are used, they go through evaluations, including barrier, abuse, machine runnability, shelf-life, etc., before they become viable.
After successful completion of those evaluations, the material goes through a series of pre-commercialization tests before full approval. If new equipment is utilized, a parallel path of factory acceptance testing (FAT) occurs with the equipment.
Food waste factors in
New sustainable designs are not only focused on reducing packaging waste but also food waste.
"We don't want to make a sustainable packaging change and have that change drastically reduce the shelf life of the product and therefore result in more food waste," said Ballinger. "The same goes for proper package and product sizing. If we find out that consumers struggle to eat through a one-pound package of lunch meat and product consistently gets thrown away, then we need to look at making that package smaller to fit the need of the consumer."
New equipment can be brought in pending the kind of product changes and equipment capabilities. "But in general, we try to make changes that work on current equipment," said Ballinger.
As a result, OEMs always factor into the sustainability equation to make the necessary changes required on existing — or new — equipment. OEM
Oliver Ballinger, senior scientist, packaging R&D at Hormel Foods. Hormel Foods
The redesign of Justin’s peanut butter jars uses 30% less plastic, amounting to over 165,000 pounds of materials saved annually.
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Stephanie Neil • Executive Editor packaging oem
AMBIENT IoT & GENERATIVE AI TO GIVE PACKAGES A “VOICE”
Using natural-language technology, batteryfree smart tags, and a smartphone, Wiliot’s data platform can provide supply chain analysis and report on the state of the product inside the package.
What if your package could talk? Imagine the story it would tell about its supply chain journey, including handling and transport conditions, carbon footprint, and even the state of the product inside the package. Today, technology is available to make "talking packages" a retail reality, and Wiliot, an ambient IoT data carrier, is a company that is making it happen.
Unlike an RFID system that requires dedicated readers, ambient IoT harvests energy from the radio waves generated by everyday devices like smartphones and tablets. It then uses this energy to communicate with other devices or applications.
According to research and advisory group Gartner, ambient IoT is one of the technologies that will play a significant role in the future of digital organizations by enabling new ecosystems, new business models based on knowing the location or behavior of objects, smarter products with new behaviors, and a much lower cost of tracking and monitoring.
Wiliot battery-free Bluetooth sensor tag. Wiliot
packaging oem
Understanding its potential, Wiliot is taking its ambient IoT platform a step further by integrating natural-language technology with its IoT Pixels which are stamp-sized, battery-free smart tags that can be affixed to products, packaging, containers, crates, pallets, and more. Communicating via Bluetooth, these IoT Pixels provide information such as location, temperature, humidity, and carbon footprint to the Wiliot cloud where the data is analyzed.
Recently, Wiliot expanded the breadth of this offering by announcing the launch of WiliBot, a generative AI (GenAI) chatbot that enables naturallanguage conversations with any ambient IoT-connected product. When GenAI is combined with this source of real-time ambient physical world data, manufacturers, warehouses, retailers, and eventually consumers, can have important conversations with the products they make, source, distribute, and ultimately purchase.
A new kind of packaging language
According to the company, with WiliBot, individuals can converse with products and supply chains using a smartphone to ask specific questions such as: What's the shelf life of this product? How did it get to the store? Which product should I stock next, and why? Is this product safe to stock, and why? What is the carbon footprint of this product, and why is it so low or so high?
"Ambient IoT and generative AI are increasingly symbiotic technologies," explained Wiliot CEO Tal Tamir. "Ambient IoT generates vast amounts of data about trillions of everyday things, and GenAI can uniquely make sense
Wiliot’s Ambient Data Platform revealed that food shrink accounts for roughly 5% of goods in the food chain.
WiliBot answers supply chain questions. Wiliot
of all that data. On the flip side, GenAI learns by analyzing vast amounts of data. To a real extent, that data has so far been finite, but ambient IoT presents massive new physical world datasets that a GenAI platform like WiliBot — and others — can use to describe products, materials, supply chains, and everything connected to the internet."
For example, the Wiliot-developed AI and machine-learning algorithms can identify supply chain events — such as sensing that shipments of produce or pharmaceuticals have been handled at unsafe temperatures — and automatically generate alerts or AI responses that allow businesses to course-correct or optimize operations.
According to Wiliot, the importance of the linkage between ambient IoT and AI was demonstrated during recent projects with leading food retailers. In the projects, the Wiliot Ambient Data
Platform revealed that food shrink (food that is lost, damaged, or spoiled before it reaches store shelves) accounts for roughly 5% of goods in the food chain.
The Wiliot platform can solve twothirds of these food shrink issues, the company said, ensuring a safer food supply, higher customer satisfaction, and lower costs. And WiliBot will now democratize access to these insights across the organization.
"Although Wiliot's work in generative AI is relatively recent, the company has long been a pioneer in artificial intelligence and machine learning for deriving insights into ambient IoT data," Tamir said. "As more companies have begun rolling out Wiliot's Ambient Data Platform, we've been asked how GenAI capabilities might make the transformation even easier. Our answer is WiliBot, the real-world combination of ambient IoT and AI."
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Timeline for testing the technology
Wiliot is currently piloting WiliBot with its key enterprise customers with a broader rollout scheduled for 2025.
In the future, this convergence of ambient IoT and generative AI will be made available to consumers in-store and at home through an ecosystem of mobile apps enabling consumers to converse with their products. The ability for the package or product to "talk" will provide more insight and understanding of the overall carbon footprint, materials composition, ethical sourcing compliance, quality and safety, and more, the company said. OEM
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