As the weather improves we’ll be looking at perishable products and the best packaging to help preserve your shelf-life.

Improving shelf-life is an ongoing battle for producers of fresh and frozen food, seed banks, and manufacturers of sensitive equipment. Protecting your product from the environment is the key to maximising product viability and reducing wastage. Contact with water and oxygen can cause food to mould and spoil, seeds to germinate before they can be planted, and equipment to rust or fail before use.

To prevent this, Moore & Buckle incorporates a variety of barrier properties into their bags to give customers the best chance of protecting their creation through storage and transportation, all the way to the point of sale.

Barrier options

Barrier foil laminates provide one of the lowest water vapour and oxygen transmission rates available for a flexible material. Usually sandwiched between a PET and LDPE layer, even at 6.35 microns thick, aluminium foil gives a 40 times better moisture barrier and a 100 times better oxygen barrier than a corresponding PET/LDPE laminate! Foil can be overkill for some applications though, so we keep a variety of materials on hand for every eventuality.

Metallised materials are the next best thing to foil itself. Made from an atomically thin layer of sputter-coated aluminium, it provides a respectable moisture and oxygen barrier while allowing the material to remain as flexible as possible. Often used in snack foods, coffee, and chocolate bars, metallised films provide barrier properties as well as an attractive sparkle that makes any print pop.

For transparent packaging solutions, previous offerings have included ethylene-vinyl alcohol (EvOH) as a co-extruded layer within LDPE. EvOH can provide a good oxygen barrier and has previously been used in ketchup bottles to preserve the freshness of a tomato flavour which is prone to oxidation. A newer alternative however is to incorporate a layer of aluminium oxide (AlOx) which, like metallisation, uses a sputter coated layer of AlOx to provide a super thin layer of protection which can then be sandwiched between two polymer layers. Unlike metallisation, AlOx gives barrier properties while maintaining transparency, which is perfect to show off your product.

To provide the best protection for your product, Moore & Buckle keeps healthy stocks of all these materials and they can be provided as reels, pouches, or sheets. Contact our team at sales@mooreandbuckle.com or 01744 733066 for more information.