Every meat packaging format has its place, at least for today. By tomorrow the market landscape may have shifted once again, reordering the field. This isn’t news; it’s the nature of a responsive and vibrant retail marketplace. Lifestyles, economics, and trends persistently conspire to skew the most critical consumer question, “What’s for dinner tonight?” There’s never a shortage of suitors vying to provide the next answer.
The flood of schemes to configure meat that better appeals to shoppers’ appetites, circumstances, and wallets rarely brings radical packaging changes. People don’t buy packaging, they buy products, and it makes good sense to adapt new ones to existing packaging processes, if possible. However, the effect of these market entries, not so much individually but on the whole, is to redefine the application sweet spots for the major packaging formats. Modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) and overwrap are two good examples.