What Are the Suitable Frozen Food Packaging Materials?

Millennials prefer convenience. Be it chopped fruits, vegetables, dairy, or semi-cooked meals; frozen food comes up like a savior in this busy lifestyle. In fact, nutritionists believe that frozen food can actually be healthier than their off-season counterparts. But what's most desirable is an effective frozen food packaging.

While freezing, most frozen food products expand up to 9% depending on their moisture content. Therefore, frozen food packaging material needs to be strong and flexible to accommodate these changes.

Selecting the right packaging material for your frozen food is the key to the effectiveness of the product. The basic points to consider while deciding your frozen food packaging material are,

• It should be able to withstand freezing temperatures between zero degrees to -40 degrees.
• The visual appeal so that the customer gets to know your product well before consumption.
• Sustaining sealing, freezing, storage, transportation, and sometimes cooking pressure.
• Pack well the sharp edges (if any) of the frozen food product.

The common choices for frozen food packaging include tin cans, cardboard, laminated paper, and flexible and rigid plastic materials. Fresh vegetables, fruits, and dressed meat also use simple shrink wraps. Following is some of the popular frozen food packaging materials.

1. Polyethylene (PE) film - PE films can withstand temperature as low as -40 degrees without compromising film quality. They also deliver good mechanical strength and puncture resistance during low-temperature transportation, handling, and storage. In addition, PE films are printable and can be layered for extra protection.
2. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) - PET can withstand abrupt temperature change. Hence, it is generally used for boil-in-the-bag or microwaveable frozen product packaging. Rigid frozen food packaging also uses PET derivatives.
3. Cardboard and laminated paper - These are commonly seen in FMCG products like ice-creams, curds, fresh fruit juices etc. However, this packaging has a limited life after taking the product off from the freezer.
4. Tin cans - Tin cans are the traditional frozen food packaging material. But PET and PE are taking over metal cans because they are more economical. However, known brands still use tin cans to retain their brand identity.  

Sowinpaper can offer most suitable paper solutions for you, and we are very experienced in frozen paper package production. For the frozen paper package, here are several options for you, please contact us for more details!