European Food Packer Aurora Foods Cuts Retort Waste with Retortable Pouches Food Packaging
“We were throwing away almost one in ten pouches after retort,” says Maja Lindqvist, sustainability lead at Aurora Foods, a mid-sized European food packer based in Malmö. “That number kept me up at night.”
Aurora Foods had built its business on ready-to-eat soups, sauces, and plant-based meals. But its conventional retortable pouches food packaging line was struggling with seal failures, film waste, and a carbon footprint that no longer matched the company’s 2030 targets.
What happened next was not a straightforward switch. It was a two-year project involving material trials, a new stand up pouch with nozzle format, and some uncomfortable conversations about cost. Here is how the team moved from a 9% reject rate to a workable system—without pretending the trade-offs disappeared.
Aurora Foods: A European Food Packer with a Retort Problem
Aurora Foods started in 1998 as a family cannery in southern Sweden. By 2023, it employed around 120 people across two plants and shipped soups, sauces, and ready meals into Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The company also ran a smaller dry-goods division that packed a whey protein bag line and used flat bottom gusset bags for muesli and granola.
That dry side was where sustainability targets felt easier. Mono-material films, paper options, and recycled content were already on the table. The retort side was harder. Retort pouches need a high-barrier structure to survive 121°C sterilisation, and most multi-layer laminates are not recyclable in typical European collection systems.
Maja Lindqvist joined Aurora in 2021 with a mandate to cut packaging carbon footprint by 35% by 2030. “I didn’t want another greenwashing report,” she says. “I wanted to know which changes were real and which were just moving the problem to another waste stream.”
Why Retortable Pouches Food Packaging Became the Focus
The first audit was uncomfortable. Seal failures after the retort cycle were running between 8% and 10%, depending on the product and line. For a plant producing roughly 1.2 million pouches a year, that meant about 100,000 to 120,000 rejected units—enough to fill several pallets every month.
Root causes were mixed. Film gauge variation from one supplier was one issue. Product contamination in the seal area was another. The filling line also struggled with sauces that splashed onto the sealing zone. Changeovers took around 90 minutes, and operators had little room to adjust without risking leaks.
Sustainability pressure made the quality problem more urgent. Several EU markets were tightening packaging rules, and retailers were asking for recyclable or mono-material formats. But the existing laminate—PET, aluminium foil, and PE—was difficult to recycle and carried a higher carbon footprint than the company wanted to defend.
Testing a Stand Up Pouch with Nozzle and Recyclable Films
The team narrowed the project to three film structures: the existing PET/AL/PE laminate, a high-barrier mono-PE retort film, and a PP-based alternative. Over six months, they ran 14 trials, starting with water and then moving to tomato sauce and lentil soup. The mono-PE film showed promise, but it ran slower on the filling line and needed tighter seal temperature control.
They also redesigned the package format. For sauces, they tested a stand up pouch with nozzle that allowed consumers to dispense without a separate bowl. The nozzle added cost and a new leak-testing step, but it cut product waste in consumer kitchens—a factor that mattered to Aurora’s retail partners.
On the dry side, the company made quicker progress. It moved part of its whey protein bag production to flat bottom gusset bags, which gave better shelf stability and a more stable billboard. For sample packs and café orders, it began sourcing small brown paper bags bulk from a regional supplier. The retort team also reviewed kraft pouches wholesale options for a dry muesli line, though kraft alone could not meet retort barrier requirements.
Results, Trade-offs, and What Comes Next
After 18 months, the reject rate on the pilot line settled between 3% and 4%. That still was not zero, but it cut annual pouch waste by roughly 35–40%. Energy use per pouch dropped by about 12% after the team adjusted seal pressure and dwell time. The carbon footprint of the mono-PE structure was 18–22% lower than the old laminate in Aurora’s internal life-cycle assessment, though that figure depended heavily on end-of-life assumptions.
The trade-offs were real. The new film cost 15–20% more per pouch, and line speed was 10–15% slower than the old laminate. In some EU countries, mono-PE retort pouches are accepted in recycling streams; in others, they are not. Aurora had to be honest with retailers about that gap rather than claim a universal recycling solution.
“The lesson was not that one material wins everywhere,” Maja says. “It was that we had to match the package to the collection system, the product, and the consumer. That is messier than a simple recyclable logo.” Next, Aurora plans to expand the mono-PE format to two more soup lines and run a small trial with a chemical recycling partner. The team still buys kraft pouches wholesale for dry goods, but for retortable pouches food packaging, the future looks more mono-material—if the economics and infrastructure catch up.
