Food+

Our packs help bring safe and affordable food and drink to millions of people every day.

SIG packaging systems are well suited to deliver nutritious food and drinks which support the healthy lifestyles that consumers increasingly aspire to. Our aseptic technology means this can be done without chilling, helping to make safe nutrition accessible to people who need it most in emerging markets and regions of the world affected by wars or natural disasters.

The integration of bag-in-box and spouted pouches into our portfolio through acquisitions this year offers significant potential to expand the amount and types of nutritious food we help customers deliver by providing solutions for products like fruit and vegetable purees as well as larger sizes of milk products. The very high evacuation rates for these solutions also minimise food waste during use.

Together with their strong environmental credentials, our packaging solutions are extremely well placed to contribute to a net positive food system – while helping our customers and our business grow.

Our commitment

We partner with customers to deliver food in a safe, sustainable and affordable way to people around the world. That’s our purpose. Through our focus on Food+, we aim to deliver even more safe and nutritious food and drink to people around the world.

We will do this by increasing access so that consumers can buy nutritious food in more locations and outlets, and by keeping food in aseptic packs safe for up to 12 months without refrigeration. We are also actively seeking to secure more partnerships with customers that provide nutritious food and drink, and to help customers reach more people in the markets where this can make the biggest difference.

Beyond this, we are committed to minimising food loss during filling by our customers, and sharing our technology with communities through our innovative Cartons for Good project, led by the SIG Way Beyond Good Foundation, to pack and store surplus food crops that would otherwise be lost.

Our targets

Our progress

Customers used our aseptic and chilled cartons to deliver 12.1 billion litres of nutritious¹ food and drinks in 2022, and our new bag-in-box and spouted pouch business offers opportunities to grow this significantly. We also enabled more start-ups to launch nutritious new products through our SIGCUBATOR programme. We maintained robust food safety standards with ISO 9001 and BRCGS AA certification at all our aseptic carton production plants, minimised food loss for customers with our industry-leading waste rate of less than 0.5% for filling, and developed plans to scale up our pilot Cartons for Good project.

“SIG plays a key role in a resilient food system – one in which safe, nutritious and reliable food supports humans to thrive. The company has been on a journey in developing its Way Beyond Good ambitions amidst the linked global challenges of climate change, rising inequality and nature loss, led by its deep commitment to contribute a Net Positive impact on people and planet.

Alongside other leading global companies such as Nestlé, Unilever and INGKA, SIG contributed to the Business Transformation Compass – guidance for just and regenerative business. In 2022, SIG and Forum for the Future used this framework to explore how SIG can build on the robust foundations of its existing commitments, extend its ambition to have a greater positive impact, and increase integration between the Way Beyond Good pillars of Food+, Climate+, Forest+ and Resource+. Together, we established key areas for future focus, including supporting nutrition and food equality, tackling food loss and food insecurity, building livelihoods and supporting the adoption of regenerative agriculture.

There is huge scope for SIG to increase its net positive impact by scaling up the SIGCUBATOR and Cartons for Good programmes, using its influence as a packaging partner to shape the nutritional content of customers’ products and encouraging adoption of regenerative agricultural practices by contributing to the growing dialogue on this topic.”

Performance in 2022

Delivering nutrition

• Our aseptic and chilled beverage cartons helped customers deliver 19.6 billion litres of food and beverages to consumers around the world in 2022, including 12.1 billion litres of nutritious products, such as milk and fruit juice, that contribute to a balanced diet and better health (as defined by the independent Health Star Rating System).² Since 2020, the amount of nutritious food and beverage products we have helped customers deliver to consumers has increased by 8%. This year, we also began exploring how to integrate our newly acquired bag-in-box and spouted pouch solutions into our Food+ strategy and key performance indicators to realise their potential to increase the amount and types of nutritious food we help customers deliver.
• We continued our partnership with Forum for the Future to explore ways to increase our positive impact on a resilient food supply system. This includes our potential to influence how much of the food we pack is sustainably sourced (including accelerating adoption of regenerative agricultural practices), and how much of it is delivering nutrition to the people who need it most based on a heatmap of malnutrition in the regions we serve. Building on this initial analysis, we are working to define activities and indicators to take our Food+ strategy forward. Together, we identified relevant risks and opportunities and looked at how global trends interact across our other Way Beyond Good action areas to enrich our understanding of barriers and enablers. One of the tools we used was Forum for the Future’s Business Transformation Compass for a regenerative and just transition, which we helped develop for businesses to create transformational strategies to address global societal challenges together with other leading companies (see quote from Forum for the Future above).
• We began an analysis of our key customers’ ambitions in relation to delivery of sustainably produced food products, reduction of food loss or food waste, and support for a healthier, more balanced diet. This analysis will enable us to engage in focused discussions with customers on how we can help them achieve their ambitions, including through our know-how of aseptic processing and filling technology or our capacity to offer pilot filling trials under consumable food conditions to support market research on consumer appetite for new nutritious products. For example, our combiLab team is currently working with Givaudan to explore how to optimise the aseptic processing of a plant-based drinking yoghurt.
• By moving from retort cans to SIG aseptic cartons, Daesang Wellife in South Korea has been able to extend the reach of its nutritious products to more people in more settings by providing convenient on-the-go packs. In 2022, the company launched a nutritional drink made with purified water, soy, whey and casein protein concentrates – enriched with fibre, calcium, yeast extract, nutritional fortifying agent and plant-based ingredients such as barley, rice, bean sprouts, oats and sesame – in our combismile 250 ml on-the-go cartons.
• We welcomed two more start-ups to our SIGCUBATOR programme (see case study above) to gain advice, consumer insights and access to our filling machines to pack nutritious new products on a small scale: MAD Foods with its pea-based drinks in Asia Pacific; and Earth & Iron with its ready-to-drink plant protein milk in the UK. More start-ups have also been selected for support through the SIGCUBATOR programme.
• SIG won the award for Breakthrough Food Technology at the Gulfood Manufacturing Industry Excellence Awards 2022 for Heat &Go, the first aseptic carton that can be heated in the microwave. This innovation enables us to help customers like Daesang Wellife deliver nutrition in our cartons in a new way, meeting growing consumer demand for nutritious hot breakfast drinks for both immediate and on-the-go consumption, while benefiting from the lower environmental impact that beverage cartons offer compared with alternative types of packaging.
• Our Way Beyond Good Champions’ global Food+ campaign engaged employees to raise awareness of SIG’s role in preventing food waste and delivering nutrition to people around the world, and reaching out to support communities (see Responsible culture: communities). We also donated unopened food packs that underwent quality testing at our tech centre to charities, including local foodbanks near our sites and an organisation supporting aid for Ukraine.

Maintaining food quality and safety

• We continued to assess the health and safety impacts of all our products and services regularly in relation to food quality and safety. There were no incidents of non-compliance concerning the health and safety impacts of products and services in 2022.
• We maintained global certification to the ISO 9001:2015 quality management standard for our aseptic carton business and ran an online training programme for employees in relevant roles on how we implement the requirements.
• All our aseptic carton production plants have achieved AA Grade certification to the Brand Reputation Compliance Global Standards (BRCGS) packaging standard (Issue 6).
• The SIG combiLab at our Tech Centre Europe, where we work together with customers to develop new nutritious recipes for their products, maintained certification to the International Featured Standards (IFS) Food Standard.

Minimising food loss from filling and using our packs

• Our highly efficient filling machines continue to lead the beverage carton industry with a waste rate of 0.5% or less, minimising not only the number of packs wasted in the filling process, but also the potential loss of food products inside.
• SIG NEO, our next-generation machine launched at the end of 2021 and currently being prepared for field testing, is designed to cut our waste rate even further. The accompanying combivita pack and truTwist closure also improve pourability to further reduce the amount of food residue left in a pack after use.

Turning food loss into safe nutrition for those most in need

• Cartons for Good, the SIG Way Beyond Good Foundation’s flagship project, continued in Bangladesh using our specially designed Cartons for Good food filling unit to turn five tonnes of harvest food loss that farmers could not otherwise sell into more than 24,600 nutritious meals preserved in SIG cartons in 2022. Our project partner BRAC, a local NGO, distributed filled Cartons for Good packs to schools to offer regular hot meals for 130 children in the urban slums of Dhaka. We also provided 3,000 packs to families in the region who were affected by flooding in 2022.
• Building on the experience of the pilot project, we are developing plans to scale up Cartons for Good to save more food from being lost by turning it into nutritious meals. We have developed a technical concept and begun discussions with potential partners who can help us implement it.

1 Defined by the independent Health Star Rating System as food and drinks that contribute to a balanced diet and lead to better health.

2 Includes the chilled carton business we acquired in 2022.