The Future of Food Packaging

Ever worn a white shirt while opening a can of tomato soup? Food packaging tops the list of things you don’t think about but can mess with your day.

A Food companies spend a lot of time thinking about packaging as a way to represent their brand and make consumers love their products. More than cosmetic details like labels or logos, a food’s container can suggest playfulness, environmental consciousness, or high technology. Packaging provides consumers’ first and last impressions of a product.

B Fortunately for consumers, advances in food packaging technology promise to make food storage and preparation simpler. Consumers are growing ever more obsessed with sleek technology, reducing food waste, and minimizing health risks to themselves and the environment, and in response, food packaging is undergoing some interesting developments. Food-packaging designers are hard at work to make groceries environmentally friendly, compact, and functional.

C Edible packaging has been proposed as one solution to consumers’ environmental concerns because it leaves no waste. The fried chicken chain KFC, for example, is experimenting with an edible coffee-cup. Made from a hard cookie lined with heat-resistant white chocolate, the cup is KFC’s attempt to reduce its landfill waste and satisfy customers who want businesses to support food-system sustainability. Another company, Stonyfield Organic, introduced frozen yogurt ‘pearls’ using edible food wrappers. The skin has no flavour and can be rinsed and eaten with the yogurt (much like a grape), eliminating the need for plastic spoons or wrappers. Similarly, a company called Loliware has sold gelatin-based edible drinking cups in flavours like Madagascar vanilla and tart cherry. And last year, the company introduced edible cupcake wrappers made from potato starch. Even with these advances, one decade-old edible invention continues to see great success -- the clear paper used to wrap Japanese Botan Rice Candy.

D Another development has been nonstick packaging, which can eliminate the 3 to 15 percent of sauces left inside traditional bottles, like those last trails of ketchup and mayonnaise that won’t come out no matter how hard you shake or squeeze. Liquiglide -- which refers to both a company and the product it makes -- is a permanently wet slippery surface that allows viscous matter to slide off easily. Liquiglide estimates that its coating could prevent 1 million tons of food waste each year. The coating is made from components approved by the US government, and, according to the company, does not affect the taste or smell of food. Another benefit of Liquiglide is that it prevents carbonated beverages from going flat.

E New safety-enhancing packaging is now addressing the issue of food spoilage. It might seem this was solved long ago with the advent of the ‘Sell-by date stamp’, which was meant to warn customers of when the food would no longer be suitable for consumption. But after a Harvard report revealed that sell-by dates are often inaccurate because of variances in transportation and grocery store policies, and that they also contribute to America’s food-waste problem, the stamps have lost credibility in the food industry. In response, scientists are working on food packaging -- like plastic wrap -- that is ‘active and intelligent’ with tiny embedded sensors to first detect and later prevent food from spoiling. This advancement in food packaging draws upon nanotechnology, which is dedicated to making electronic sensors tiny and inexpensive.

F Another emerging technology is packaging that disappears. MonoSol, LLC creates food-grade water-soluble bags for pre-portioned oatmeal or rice. When boiled, the bag dissolves, leaving only the food, ready to eat. Tomorrow Machine, a Swedish design firm, has plans for three disappearing packages: an oil bottle made from hardened sugar that cracks open like an egg; a fruit juice container made from seaweed that will wither at the same rate as its content; and a peelable beeswax package for rice or other dry goods.

G Super-compressed packaging serves the increasing number of city dwellers who generally have tiny kitchens and no storage room. Additionally, many people living in urban areas walk home from grocery stores, and they need lighter and smaller packages. Tomorrow Machine is also working on a compressed tiny package that expands into a full-size bowl when hot water is added.

Marine mammals exhibit their ingenuity

Dolphins use "tools" to help hunt for food

In the deep, clear channels of Australia’s Shark Bay, bottlenose dolphins have discovered tools, raising questions about the origins of intelligent behaviour, the nature of learning, and the birth of technology. There, dolphins in one extended family routinely use sponges* to protect their noses as they forage for fish hidden in the abrasive seafloor sand, according to Georgetown University scientists.

As far as the researchers can tell, a single dolphin may have invented the technique relatively recently and taught it to her offspring. The simple innovation dramatically changed their behaviour, hunting habits, and social life, the researchers found. Those that adopted it became loners who spent much more time hunting than others and dive more deeply in search of prey. The sponging dolphins teach the technique to all their young, but only the females seem to grasp the idea. ‘It is indisputably tool use,’ says primate anthropologist Craig Stanford at the University of Southern California, an authority on animal cognition and behaviour. For those seeking a glimpse of our own beginnings, the dolphins of Shark Bay offer a hint of the inventive impulse that occurred when our earliest ancestors first shaped destiny by fashioning implements with their hands.

Tool use of any sort among wild animals is rare, difficult to document reliably, and controversial. The line between instinct, ingenuity, and intelligence is easily blurred by wishful thinking, experts caution. Field observations often give rise to scholarly disputes. Even so, 10 primate species of monkeys and apes, along with 30 species of birds, are thought to use sticks, rocks, or leaves as tools.

In the first in-depth analysis of this natural dolphin behaviour, marine biologist and psychologist Dr. Janet Mann at Georgetown University and her colleagues found that the dolphins of Shark Bay use their makeshift hunting masks more often than any other species uses tools, except human beings.

The curious hunting habit was first observed by a local fisherman who reported to marine biologists that he had seen a dolphin with an odd growth on its nose. Monitoring its movements through the bay’s unusually clear waters, researchers soon discovered that the dolphin was actually balancing a conical basket sponge on its nose.

At first, it was not evident what the dolphin was doing with a sponge. Observing from a small boat, Dr. Mann and her colleagues eventually identified 41 dolphins who regularly used sponges to hunt, cataloguing 1,295 dives in which they surfaced with sponges on their snouts. Researchers were startled to realise that the dolphins of Shark Bay employed one living creature as a tool to help hunt another.

Not any basket sponge would do, the researchers soon learned. The dolphins might search for 10 minutes to locate one with the right conical shape to cap their nose, tear it free of its mooring, and then carry it to a preferred hunting ground along channels between eight metres and 13 metres deep. ‘You can see that they are scattering the sand gently as they go along,’ says Dr. Mann. ‘When they startle a fish out of the sand, they immediately drop the sponge and go after it.’

‘They return to retrieve the sponge and pick up the hunt again, repeating the pattern. They really use these sponges as a foraging tool,’ says dolphin biologist Maddalena Bearzi, president of the Ocean Conservation Society of Los Angeles. ‘They discovered it could create an advantage in their foraging technique, and they pass it from generation to generation.’ However, among the hundreds of dolphins living in this bay, only a few dozen use sponges to keep from scraping their noses, and that offered researchers an opportunity to compare creatures that use tools to others of the same species that do not.

Although these dolphins all appear to be related, researchers at the University of New South Wales suggest that nurture, not nature, is the reason these dolphins use tools, ruling out genetic explanations for the behavior. Instead, they are convinced that the use of sponges is passed from one generation to the next through imitation. Among bottlenose dolphins, mothers nurse their young for up to eight years, ample time for calves to absorb their mother’s hunting tricks by observation. ‘This is an example of culture among these animals,’ says Dr. Bearzi. ‘This is part of the reason it is so important.’

So far, almost all of the dolphin spongers have proved to be female. ‘The sex difference is really striking,’ Dr. Mann says. ‘I don’t know of another species where it is so dramatic.’ Of the sponging offspring, only the daughters could be seen still sponging once they reached maturity. The sons tried it but almost always abandoned it. Male dolphins rarely play a role in child-rearing and tend to fish in packs.

For Dr. Mann, the discovery that dolphins, too, are tool users adds an unexpected dimension to the history of innovation, shedding new light on animal intelligence. Clever mimics and fast learners, dolphins have unusually large brains -- four times the size of a chimpanzee’s and second only to humans in relative size. ‘It speaks to this whole issue of creativity and learning and brain size,’ she says. ‘The number one question that drives me and others is: Why do dolphins have such big brains? What are they doing down there in the water that requires them to be so smart?’

* sponges: simple sea creatures with porous bodies