The food marketplace is truly a vivid reflection of our culture, demographics and economics. Because retail packaging occupies an essential role for processors and retailers as a direct interface with consumers, its formats must adjust to stay in step with notions of how an increasingly diverse shopper base wants fresh and further processed meats served to them in retail display cases.
Recently, I heard modified atmosphere packaging (MAP), a fixture in everyone’s meat case, is facing growing challenges from vacuum formats such as flex/flex — film on film — and vacuum skin packaging (VSP). No worries; this is neither life-threatening to MAP nor even headline news, but it may illustrate how a ubiquitous packaging format’s market function may be permanently altered because of changing marketing imperatives.