A standard pack of cheese singles contains 24 slices, all individually wrapped in 24 pieces of plastic and packaged again in a larger sleeve.
According to a Simmons National Consumer Survey, 30.45 million people eat a pound or more of cheese singles per week — and that’s just in the United States.
All of that cheese packaging ends up in landfills and incinerators, adding to the global heap of plastic waste.
As an alternative to single-use plastic wrapping, Ogilvy Colombia and Nestlé Central America have created “Self-Packing Cheese.”
The new biodegradable film is designed to decompose within 300 days of disposal — in stark contrast to the estimated 1,000 years it takes for standard plastic to break down.
And it’s entirely made from cheese waste and whey.
Whey is the byproduct created when liquid separates from milk during the cheesemaking process.
In the industry, billions of liters of whey are produced annually, and — when improperly disposed of — whey waste leads to water pollution and oxygen depletion in waterways around the world.
In fact, a study published in Body & Society found that dumping whey is 175 times more damaging to the environment than dumping raw, untreated human sewage.
“The new packaging has a double-edged impact, reducing plastic waste and giving discarded whey a second life,” Ogilvy Colombia and Nestlé Central America said in a joint press release.
“Nestlé is testing Self-Packing Cheese as a primary and secondary packaging of Nestlé ¡Qué Rico! cheeses distributed in Panama, and aiming to produce 5.500 tons of the product with 100% biodegradable whey-based packaging.”
To create the Self-Packing Cheese, the design teams blended microorganisms in a controlled lab with byproducts from the cheesemaking process
“We discovered that the solution was in the cheese itself,” said chemical engineer Adrianna Sarmiento. “That’s why we created bioplastic from whey.”
The resulting compound resembles a collection of small pellets, which are then processed with injected air and transformed into thin, plastic-like sheets. The cheese waste plastic, which has a slight waxy tinge from the whey, meets FDA standards and can still be printed over for branding purposes.
It should be noted that Nestlé is not immune to criticism. Since the 1970s, the company has been widely criticized for using child labor in its cocoa supply chain, particularly in West Africa, spreading misinformation about infant nutrition, and siphoning gallons of water from federal land.
Despite Nestlé’s clouded history, wider adoption of biodegradable designs portends more sustainable and circular practices within the food industry at large.
“This could revolutionize food packaging,” a promotional video promises. “The future of Nestlé packaging isn’t limited to cheese.”
Header image via Ogilvy
