Sustainable Food Packaging Practices
Restaurants and foodservice operators are increasingly turning to sustainable packaging, and their efforts are paying off. The path to implementing more eco-friendly solutions begins with understanding the available choices and balancing various trade-offs to ensure both operational performance and environmental stewardship.
When making decisions around alternative packaging, operators need to look beyond the basic table stakes of food safety and packaging performance. It is critical to also evaluate local packaging regulations, product availability, and the specific waste-handling infrastructure of the communities being served.
Corporate Sustainability Initiatives
Many global restaurant chains are establishing harmonized, cross-brand packaging policies to tackle waste. These policies generally cover several focus areas:
Eliminating unnecessary packaging.
Shifting to alternative, eco-friendly materials.
Supporting improved recovery and recycling systems.
Investing in circularity (ensuring products are sustainably produced and their lifecycles end sustainably).
Through these initiatives, major operators have successfully reduced their use of expanded polystyrene to a fraction of a percent. Many have set ambitious goals for the near future, including eliminating unnecessary plastics entirely, reducing virgin plastic content, and transitioning all consumer-facing plastics to reusable, recyclable, or compostable alternatives.
Key Considerations for Sustainable Packaging
Industry research highlights several critical factors operators must weigh when sourcing more sustainable alternatives:
Performance: No matter the material, eco-friendly packaging must serve its primary purpose—transporting food in optimal condition. It must maintain food temperatures, remain durable, and prevent leaks. Always put sustainable options through a rigorous testing phase before fully committing.
Sizing and Shrinking SKUs: Ensure containers fit the portion size accurately. Containers that are too large make servings look small, allow food to shift in transit, and waste materials. Containers that are too small risk leaking. Streamline disposable items by altering portion sizes or presentations so a single sustainable container can be used for multiple menu items.
Waste Reduction Strategies: Replace single-serve condiment packets with bulk dispensers for on-site dining. Train staff to ask customers if they need cutlery, straws, or napkins rather than automatically tossing them into every takeout bag.
Ease of Disposability: Sustainability efforts rely on customer participation. Clearly communicate whether containers should be recycled, composted, or reused. For on-site dining, use clear graphic signage to instruct customers on which bins to use for different items.
Local Sustainability Infrastructure: A packaging solution that works in one city may fail in another. Your choices should align with whether a market offers curbside recycling or commercial composting. For instance, #1 (PETE) or #2 (HDPE) plastics are great for strong curbside recycling programs, but some local recyclers will not accept food packaging with residue. Similarly, compostable packaging offers no environmental advantage if it ends up in a standard landfill where it cannot properly decompose.
Vendor Partnerships: Choose suppliers who share your environmental goals and proactively recommend alternative solutions. For example, when one major salad chain found itself with a massive surplus of plastic beverage cups, it partnered with a manufacturer to upcycle thousands of pounds of those cups into compostable utensils, diverting them from the waste stream.
Branding: Select sustainable takeout containers that can be customized with your logo, using the space to message that the container is sustainably sourced or can be discarded in an eco-friendly way.