Sustainable Bio-Based Tray Made in the USA

Ancestral health brand Primal Kitchen, part of Kraft Heinz, is the first to commercialize a new, dual-ovenable molded fiber tray based on U.S.-grown sugarcane.

Caption: Primal Kitchen’s new line of bowls and skillets, launched in April 2020, are available D2C via Thrive Market, or in leading retailers like Walmart, Whole Foods, Wegmans and more.
Caption: Primal Kitchen’s new line of bowls and skillets, launched in April 2020, are available D2C via Thrive Market, or in leading retailers like Walmart, Whole Foods, Wegmans and more.

Primal Kitchen® was founded in 2015 by Mark Sisson, an endurance athlete, New York Times best-selling author, and early advocate of ancestral health practices via his top health blog MarksDailyApple.com. Ancestral health is a blanket term often associated with the paleo or primal diets, and though there are a few different versions in the space like today’s popular ketogenic diet, they tend to revolve around eliminating heavily processed foods—dairy, gluten and grains in the form of bread, for instance—from the diet. From an early nutritional supplement platform and book called The Primal Blueprint, Primal Kitchen started as an e-commerce play for paleo condiments, launching a mayonnaise and salad dressing line made with avocado oil. During the early days, the brand built an extensive online distribution network, through both online health and wellness retailer Thrive market and its own direct-to-consumer (D2C) business.

“Our founder Mark Sisson really bucked the system, first by educating the world about a new way to eat via the ancestral health movement, and then creating products in CPG. The first, the mayonnaise, is made with avocado oil and other real, simple ingredients like organic, cage-free eggs,” says Ana Goettsch, VP of Marketing, Primal Kitchen. “The resulting high-quality, premium product was packaged in glass, and was launched online only, not typical of other brands path to market, especially in glass Then, once we got into Whole Foods and a variety of other bricks-and-mortar natural products retailers, the brand exploded from there. We now have over 72 SKUs in nine different categories and can be found in almost every retailer from Natural Grocers, Sprouts, and Wegmen’s to Costco and Target.”

Branching out into new pack formats 
In 2020, Primal Kitchen launched a line of three IQF frozen bowls and skillets—Chicken Panang Curry, Chicken Pesto Bowl, and Beef & Mushroom Bowl—each adhering to the now-mainstream (comparatively, at least) tenets of ancestral health. But this move also brought the company into contact with packaging formats it hadn’t previously used.

“With this lifestyle and growing consumer trends, there is an emphasis around sustainability in protein sourcing like grass-fed beef, cage-free eggs, organic ingredients where applicable, and those types of quality identifiers just resonate better when you continue that message out through the packaging that you're using,” Goettsch says.

Also, because of Primal Kitchen’s unique brand position within the natural products space—which is of a piece with other loosely related sets of ideals espousing health, wellness, and stewardship of the planet—a typical Primal Kitchen customer was likely to be seeking to eliminate single-use plastics. The average, off-the-shelf microwave-ready, single-use plastic pack used in so many major brand frozen meal packs wasn’t likely to fly with Primal Kitchens’ customer base.

Luckily, in January of 2019, Primal Kitchen’s depth of resources to solve this problem had significantly deepened, and its knowledge and capability related to packaging received a big boost. That’s when KraftHeinz acquired the brand and made available its wealth of packaging resources and know-how.

“We wanted consumers to continue to have an elevated experience with a frozen meal that might come at a premium from other frozen meals but gives the benefits of not using single-serve plastic,” Goettsch says.  

Molded sugar cane fiber brand is born 
Meanwhile, just as Primal Kitchen was getting acquired by KraftHeinz and starting R&D on the frozen bowls line, packaging materials provider and converter Sonoco had identified a new market opportunity in agricultural fiber and was investing in R&D in this new packaging tech. Looking across the different markets the company served, Sonoco experts saw a niche where it could use its competencies around the performance of dual-ovenable (stands up to oven or microwave) packaging developed from fiber. 

Dual-ovenable molded fiber bowls from Natrellis are made using raw materials entirely sourced from within the U.S.Dual-ovenable molded fiber bowls from Natrellis are made using raw materials entirely sourced from within the U.S.

Now, molded fiber isn’t particularly new to the packaging materials market. But an interesting confluence of events would eventually give food brands like Primal Kitchen fresh eyes with which to look at molded fiber trays.

A business venture launched between Sonoco Products Company and Tellus Products, LLC, combining core competencies with packaging design, materials, science, and responsible sugarcane farming and milling practices, led to the introduction of Natrellis®, a dual-ovenable package made from sugarcane fiber grown in the USA. Tellus is jointly owned by Florida Crystals Corporation, Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, and American Sugar Refining, Inc., and is part of ASR Group. Sonoco is packaging provider that specializes in all types of packaging including rigid paperboard, flexible, and rigid plastic for the food industry.

The Natrellis portfolio consists of microwaveable and conventional oven-compatible packaging designed by engineers with expertise in cook-in performance packaging, keeping the consumer experience top-of-mind.

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