Fresh food marketer Ready Pac Foods, Inc., Irwindale, CA, is celebrating another achievement on its bowl salad line. In 2012, the company launched Ready Pac Bistro Organic bowl salads, new items for the conventional line and new private label bowl salads. Now the company has tallied up the effects of on-going efforts to improve the sustainability of the product packaging and determined that the Ready Pac Bistro Bowl Salads line is on track to use more than 56,000,000 recycled plastic beverage bottles this year.
"When Ready Pac created the bowl salad line our first requirement was that the packaging used would deliver the necessary shelf life to meet or exceed our customers' requirements, and the second was to make it easy for a consumer to see how fresh the product is," says Tristan Simpson, director of marketing & corporate communications. "Since then, we have made continuous improvements over time to create a more sustainable bowl salad package, and the net effect is we're making a significant contribution to helping the environment."
More than one bottle plus per bowl
Each Ready Pac bowl salad package, including the insert that separates protein ingredients and condiments from the salad greens, contains 60 percent post-consumer recycled content. That works out to slightly more than one recycled 500-mL beverage bottle per package.
The salad bowls and inserts are produced in plants powered by 50 percent solar energy. Combining the energy savings of using recycled bottles and the solar energy savings versus conventional power, each Ready Pac bowl salad package saves about 1,000 BTUs or 0.30 kilowatt hours of electric power. This energy savings is enough to run a traditional 100-watt light bulb for about three hours, or an energy-saving 26 watt/ 1300 lumen bulb for 26 hours.
