Breakthrough For Whey Food Film Coating Project

A German-based research team has developed a way of manufacturing film coatings from whey protein in quantities large enough to make the process commercially viable.

Working at IVV - the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging - they've been striving to take a new green lead within the packaging industry by forging a sustainable material that's kind to the environment and cheap to produce.

Within a programme called the Wheylayer project, the institute's essentially replaced the petrochemical-based polymers traditionally used in film coatings with whey in a push to make food products on shelves last longer, too.

Food Film Coatings

According to IVV, packaging firms tend to use relatively high-cost petrochemical-based polymers for food film coatings, to limit the volume of oxygen that can build up. It's the presence of this oxygen that causes these products to degrade and the polymers used to counter the effect include so-called EVOH (ethylene vinyl alcohol) copolymers, which create a barrier.

The research team discovered that whey - the liquid by-product of curdled milk - acts as an oxygen barrier and, armed with this knowledge, they've rolled out a multilayered film using a range of technologies to blend whey protein with a variety of other films.

"We've managed to develop a whey protein formulation that can be used as the raw material for a film barrier layer", Markus Schmid, representing IVV, explained in a statement. "And we have also developed an economically viable process which can be used to produce the multifunctional films on an industrial scale."

Wheylayer Project

The Wheylayer project has financial support from the EU and, besides the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging, no less than 13 other organisations are also involved.

Right now, EVOH is in widespread use. The world's largest EVOH production site is Belgium's EVAL Europe facility, which opened seven years ago, while figures released by the German Society for Packaging Market Research suggest that, within Germany alone, over 640 square kilometres of materials incorporating EVOH are set to be manufactured and deployed in the year 2014. To give some indication of the volume forecast, if stretched out, these materials would fully cover Lake Constance.

Packaging International will present further coverage of this development programme as future facts emerge.

Image Copyright Fraunhofer IVV

See also:

Companies supplying Films

Companies supplying Food Grade Polythene