CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The intersection of food waste mitigation and packaging design creates a natural paradox, a panel says.
At the ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit May 19-21, a featured panel brought together diverse voices from across the food value chain to address the friction between material management and hunger relief. The discussion featured four primary experts: moderator Jackie Suggitt, vice president of business initiatives and community engagement for ReFED; Jeana Cadby, environment and climate director for Western Growers Association; Rebecca Chesney, vice president of sustainability for ISS Guckenheimer; and Leslie Rodgers, marketing and communications director for BPI.
Together, the panelists explored a natural operational paradox: “Done well, packaging is a phenomenal solution with our lens of food waste ... Done poorly, it drives more waste of food and materials,” Suggitt says. In assessing the current industry landscape, she explains that stakeholders lean slightly more toward viewing packaging as a peril rather than a promise, signaling a collective friction regarding environmental impacts, consumer confusion and shifting regulations.
Functionality of Fresh Produce Packaging
For the fresh produce sector, packaging is not merely a marketing tool; it dictates supply chain viability. Fresh produce is a living product harvested at peak freshness, requiring careful environmental management to maintain shelf life.
Cadby compares selling fresh produce to holding a melting ice cube and asking somebody how much they’re going to pay for it.
To manage this limited shelf life without a biological “kill step,” she says, packaging must provide functional sustainability — a design mindset prioritizing the physical protection of the crop alongside waste reduction. According to Cadby, key functional mechanics include:
- Pre-consumer logistics — Approximately “90% of the work that packaging does happens before the consumer ever even sees it.”
- Microclimate regulation — The packaging actively works toward “maintaining moisture and temperature; it’s the gas exchange, [and] protection.”
- Traceability and equity — Crop packaging, such as berry clamshells, allows supply chains to trace safety recalls and ensure field laborers are adequately compensated for their specific yield.
- Commodity-specific design — Cadby highlights how packaging choices must be tailored strictly to the functionality of the packaging rather than applying blanket material mandates.
Supply Chain Realities and the B2B Pipeline
Modern agricultural infrastructure requires transporting highly perishable items across vast geographic distances, such as shipping strawberries from Salinas, Calif., to Ottawa, Ontario. Historically, products like iceberg lettuce relied on heavy wooden crates packed with physical ice for transit; today, advanced polymers replace those material-heavy systems to optimize economics and food safety.
While retail packaging remains highly visible to the public, the business-to-business sector offers massive, underexplored opportunities for packaging optimization. Unlike retail consumers who demand transparent plastic clamshells to inspect produce for mold, commercial kitchens and foodservice operators handle bulk volumes. This allows commercial entities to pilot B2B circularity programs, such as returning durable plastic buckets to vendors, bypassing multilayered consumer packaging and removing single-use plastics where cross-contamination or allergen risks are minimal.
Innovation Bottleneck and Legislative Friction
The fresh produce industry frequently runs into systemic roadblocks when sustainable design innovations clash with legislative mandates and infrastructure deficits.
For instance, the strawberry industry heavily optimized the traditional polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, clamshell. Cadby says, “The strawberry PET clamshell is one of the most recyclable items that you can have ... [Manufacturers] have what’s called a BOPP (biaxially oriented polypropylene) EBO label that you can actually just take, makes it more recyclable because you’re not having that contamination from the paper sticker ... but a lot of policy is saying, well, no more of this material.”
This misalignment highlights a broader systemic issue:
- Infrastructure deficits — Emerging zero-waste policies frequently mandate a shift toward compostable or recyclable packaging, yet regional municipalities routinely lack the processing facilities or infrastructure to support them. Rodgers summarizes: “Regulation without the infrastructure to support implementations of regulation, right?”
- Extended Producer Responsibility — Rapidly expanding EPR laws, enacted in states like California, Oregon, Colorado and Washington, legally shift the financial burden of end-of-life material management back onto the producers, Cadby says.
- Timeline fractures — While regulatory targets and public expectations operate on compressed timelines, building the physical waste infrastructure, stabilizing secondary material markets and executing massive consumer education campaigns require a multidecade transition, Rodgers says.
According to the panel, true progress requires shifting the dialogue away from purely banning specific materials and focusing instead on building synchronized systems where functional packaging design aligns directly with regional processing infrastructure.
“The compostable products and packaging industry is so young, and it has so much promise for being a part of the solution that we’re all trying to figure out,” Rodgers says.
Your next read: Deeply Rooted: How a First-Generation Farm Reclaims Black Food Sovereignty
