Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom — Kraft Foods UK is promoting new resealable plastic coffee packs for its Kenco brand with a £7.5 million ($12 million) campaign, touting the new packaging's lighter footprint.
The new Eco Refill 150g packs are being pushed as an alternative to the company's glass jar-packed coffee beans. The Eco Refill packs are 97 percent lighter than their glass counterparts, and manufacturing them uses 81 percent less energy.
Kraft has also teamed up with TerraCycle's new U.K. operations to collect and reuse the waste Eco Refill packs, and other Kenco waste, by turning them into bags, picture frames and more (below).
Along with lowering the impact of packaging, Kenco is also lowering the impact of the coffee it puts in it. The company is pushing to source all of its beans from Rainforest Alliance certified farms by 2010.
Currently, 75 percent of the beans for Kenco freeze-dried coffee, all of the beans in filter coffee in the Kenco Singles range and all of the beans in the Kenco Sustainable Development range come from Rainforest Alliance certified farms.
Kraft's U.S. operations are making a coffee packaging switch as well. The company's Maxwell House brand is switching its one-pound containers from metal cans to a paperboard composite container made by Sonoco.
The container's bottom is metal, its lid is plastic and the can cylinder is 100 percent recycled paperboard with a liner. Compared to metal cans, the composite ones require 34 percent less energy to make, are 27 percent lighter and will require 4 million fewer pounds of raw material a year to produce.