The pilot action phase of the project has concluded, involving 12 small and medium-sized companies from the meat, dairy, fruit, and vegetable sectors. The participating SMEs came from four pilot areas: Hungary, Czech Republic, Northern Italy, and Slovenia.
During this phase, the SMEs met with D4PACK scientific partners – Campden BRI Hungary, Łukasiewicz – Łodz Institute of Technology, PROMA-PACK Ltd and Krakow University of Economics – and the external partners – PricewaterhouseCoopers Business Services and Politecnico di Milano – to discuss their current food packaging practices and related business processes.
Business representatives covering the topics of Quality / Sustainability / Administration / Production were interviewed in order to identify more sustainable packaging for their products and assess the readiness of their company to face the adoption of new solutions.
As a result, companies received a detailed report summarizing the main features of a set of technological solutions suggested as possible alternatives of the current packaging and a risk analysis over five main drivers: economic, environmental & social, packaging quality and efficiency, regulatory and technical feasibility.
The First Pilot Phase was essential to the D4PACK project for testing the methodology at the basis of the online tool that will soon be created and put at the disposal of the SMEs interested.