The Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC UK), has produced a new informative brochure, specifically aimed at the Restaurant and Food & Beverage industry sectors, promoting responsibly sourced and labelled materials used in the production of food and beverage packaging.

The new brochure, which was distributed with recent issues of International Sandwich & Food to Go and Café Culture magazines, highlights the facts that consumers are keen to make good environmental choices in their purchases, and this is particularly relevant when it comes to their food packaging for items in which they take-away their morning coffee, snack, lunch, or evening meal.

Consumers want to see that their packaging, be it for food or beverage items, has been responsibly sourced, is easy to recycle and has a minimal impact on the environment, the world’s resources, and forests.

As the brochure highlights, consumers trust labels, and therefore increasingly manufacturers are now producing packaging materials that are certified as sustainable through assurance and certification schemes such as PEFC.

This is illustrated further in the brochure within several case studies, where manufacturers such as AB Group Packaging have produced quality, renewable and PEFC certified paper and carrier bags for the food to go sector. The PEFC label is used by AB Group on the paper bags and food bags to demonstrate its corporate commitment to supplying customers with products that have been responsibly sourced. This was highlighted recently when a leading luxury food hall brand specified that all the carrier bags used in its food hall should certified and labelled, as they have a requirement that all the wood-based products used in their business come from well-managed forests.

Colpac is another PEFC-certified company that is featured promoting the benefits of responsibly sourced and produced packaging. With 80 year’s experience in producing an array of sandwich and food to go products, Colpac has strong green credentials, and is keen to demonstrate to consumers that the products it manufactures are sustainably sourced, with the PEFC label providing a stamp of approval and reassurance of this fact to its customers.

Benders Paper Cups is a producer of high quality paper cups, and is the UK’s only dedicated paper cups manufacturer. All the paperboard used to make its cups comes from PEFC certified forests. Most recently, Benders produced a series of specially designed paper coffee cups to mark the occasion of Hull being recognized as the City of Culture for 2017, all of which carried the PEFC label. By using the PEFC label on its paper cups, Benders states that it is demonstrating that its materials have been responsibly sourced.

The brochure can be downloaded in PDF format at http://www.pefc.co.uk/publications/certified-packaging-for-the-food-to-go-sector or hard copies can be obtained by e-mailing [email protected] 

PEFC, as the world’s leading forest certification system, has certified more than 300 million hectares of forests to PEFC’s internationally recognised Sustainability Benchmarks, supplying more than 18,000 Chain of Custody certified companies with responsibly sourced timber and wood products, such as those used in producing fibre-based paper products such as packaging.

Today, more and more companies from SMEs to global brands are keen to demonstrate that the fibre they use in their packaging materials comes from a certified sustainable source. This is important as consumers are increasingly conscious of how their purchasing decisions impact on the world’s natural resources.