In this Q&A interview, produce packaging expert Shay Zeltzer, founder of Postharvest Hub, shares his concerns over the trend toward paper packaging for produce—a trend adopted to appease consumers’ concerns about plastic, but in many cases fails to protect the product.
Packaging World:
What is your background in the produce industry?
Shay Zeltzer:
I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in postharvest. I was dealing with flowers to start with, and just when I was ready to go on to get my PhD, I got a position with a Canadian company called SunBlush. They came to Israel and were looking for someone to run their R&D. Israel at that time was a very big flower exporter, shipping flowers to Europe, mainly to the flower auctions in Holland. The idea was to be able to pack the flowers and move them to sea freight rather than air freight. So all good reasons start with the cost of shipping and the impact on the environment and the volume and so on. I joined the company as R&D director, and later on I managed the company.
We came up with a very good solution when working with the Dutch auctions. We proved that we could keep the flowers in boxes. At that time, we used boxes that were coated on the inside and created a modified atmosphere condition to preserve the freshness of the flowers and allow for the expected vase life after the flowers were unpacked. In early 2000, I moved to a flexible packaging company, StePac, when modified atmosphere packaging [MAP] was really in its infancy.
