Cartons for Good project wins SAVE FOOD competition

The SAVE FOOD Initiative, founded in 2011 by Messe Düsseldorf, interpack and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), works for reducing the enormous amounts of food that are either lost or wasted globally each year. This year, a competition was looking for projects which contribute to reducing these losses. There is now a definite winner who was given an award at the interpack alliance trade fair pacprocess MEA in Cairo. 

Among many nominations, the jury members from the FAO, the WPO and interpack/Messe Düsseldorf first selected the the three most promising projects, and then chose one of them as the winner. The project Cartons for Good by the SIG Foundation won with the idea to use the SIG know-how in bottling to help communities in poorer countries to locally turn their food into meals and extend their shelf life. The Swiss manufacturer of carton packaging and bottling technology developed a specialised bottling solution for this purpose. A smaller version of the industrialised SIG bottling plants can be easily put on a truck and transported even to remote rural areas, where fresh vegetables and fruit can then be preserved locally. Because every day, a third of all food produced all over the world is lost. Often, farmers cannot sell all their harvest on local markets, but also do not have any way to preserve their products.

In 2018, SIG engineers therefore developed a system that utilises the company’s boil-down technology to preserve food in SIG SafeBloc carton packaging. Vegetables and fruit without any added preservatives are used to prepare tasty meals which are filled into carton packaging. This way, the meals can be stored without refrigeration for up to nine months at the usual environmental conditions. This way, the Cartons for Good Initiative brings SIG food preservation and packaging technology to regions which sorely need innovative solutions to fight food loss and malnutrition. Surplus food is preserved and the livelihood of farmers is secured.

And this is how the system works: Farmers receive money for their surplus vegetables which means additional income from harvests they would otherwise not be able to sell. The communities use the vegetables to cook meals and use the SIG Foundation bottling system to preserve them in carton packaging. The food packets are then distributed to local schools, which then can offer a hot meal to children every day. After eating the meals, the packaging is collected for recycling by a local institution, so that the materials can be reused.

Since 2019, the Cartons for Good Initiative has been involved in a pilot project in the Region of Balia in Bangladesh and is offering underprivileged children a regular lunch throughout the year. And more than that: As the children receive food, they can continue to go to school. The SIG Foundation team is working locally with BRAC, the world’s largest NGO with headquarters in Bangladesh. In the year 2022 alone, 20 tonnes of vegetables were saved, 15 permanent jobs were created and 24,600 meals were distributed to 180 schoolchildren. In addition, 3,000 packages were distributed among families and people affected by the heavy floods in Bangladesh.

Currently, the SIG Foundation is planning to bring Cartons for Good to Egypt, too. There, 50 percent of all fruit and vegetables grown is wasted – approximately 73 kilograms of food waste per person each year. At the same time, more than 30 percent of Egyptians are living beneath the poverty line and one in five children is suffering from poor development. Cartons for Good has plans to use the prize of 20,000 Euro for a comprehensive study to find out where the project would have the greatest impact on the country. For example, there is a desire to identify the most important region in Egypt where freshly produced food is regularly lost in large quantities because it cannot be sold to consumers through the established commercial delivery chain. The next step is to establish a local project, lead by the local partner for implementation, the Natural Resources & Climate Protection Foundation (NCRP). For SIG, social activism and sustainability in Egypt are nothing new: In the year 2022, a project called “Recycle for Good” has already started. The project aims to introduce a change in behaviour and to encourage people to contribute their recyclable waste and thus strengthen the circular economy.