AUTOMATION

Honoring Hall of Fame Careers:

Pierre Pienaar of WPO

The Packaging & Processing Hall of Fame is inducting four new members into its ranks in 2022. Pierre Pienaar joins the Hall of Fame as a global ambassador and educator for packaging and packaging education.

By Sean Riley, Senior News Director

Most little boys who grow up on a sheep farm in South Africa don’t dream as big as being able to travel the world, meet regularly with the United Nations, teach master’s level courses at universities on at least ve continents, and serve as president of the World Packaging Organization.

And neither did Pierre Pienaar. His plan was simple. He was going to study pharmacy and eventually take over the town pharmacy run by his Godfather.

“I’ve been back to that small town, and I see people when I’m there, and they say, ‘How did you get where you are today when you came from this little town?” Pienaar says, “This town doesn’t produce people like you, traveling the world and talking about what you do.”

Like many who end up in this industry, particularly those earning the Packaging and Processing Hall of Fame, he was bit by the packaging bug.

“That was 37 years ago, and I’ve never looked back,” he says. “I’ve enjoyed every minute of packaging. I eat, sleep, and drink packaging.”

Pienaar’s packaging odyssey began in the early 1980s when he graduated from university and began working in the laboratory for a pharmaceutical company that is now part of Aspen Pharma. One day the managing director approached the four most recent hires, three production pharmacists and Pienaar, and explained, “the company is spending an enormous amount of money on packaging, and we don’t know what we are doing with our packaging.”

He told the four to decide who would be the company’s packaging expert.

“Well, fortunately for me, the other three were not even interested,” he says with a laugh, “The next thing I knew, I was researching master’s degree programs and found Brunel University in London.”

From that serendipitous start, Pienaar grew to become one of the most proli c packaging educators in the world. While working at Aspen Pharma, he started his own chapter of the South African Packaging Institute before eventually becoming president, constantly scratching an ever-growing education itch.

“I was crossing paths with people that were not suitably quali ed to discuss packaging from a scienti c point of view, especially in pharmaceuticals, where one has to be careful,” he says.

He saw it during his travels in Central Africa, where companies used the wrong materials on food products, and the food would deteriorate much quicker than it should have.

“It was something as simple as changing the material,” he says. “There was no rocket science to it, but the people didn’t know that, and these were [packaging development managers] in decision-making roles.”

In a world where 35% of food is wasted, he says this knowledge can save lives, noting that “25% of that 35% could be solved by simply using the right packaging.” This is where his work with the WPO and United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) ful lled his passion for educating the world about packaging. Even in Australia, he still encounters people working in senior packaging roles who don’t have any scienti c background. Recognizing this, Pienaar decided he needed to capture the future generations of packaging at a younger age and began lecturing on the technology and science of packaging at various universities and institutions worldwide. He relishes his interactions with students and their optimistic takes on driving recycling and sustainability through packaging. The students have also made him aware that despite his roles in the WPO and as an educator, sometimes education needs to be tied to actual boots-on-the-ground action. In Indonesia, for example, there was no recycling. Together with the WPO and UNIDO, Pienaar was able to corral 18 major multinationals like Nestlé and Coca-Cola to come together and develop ways they, as corporate citizens, could bring recycling to the fourth most populous country in the world.

“About 50% of the waste coming into the sea comes from Southeast Asia—10 million metric tons of plastic per year,” he says. “People don’t stop long enough to realize we have a massive problem on our hands.”

With signi cant players backing this program, Indonesia is developing recycling and collection and moving the waste back into a form where it can be used again.

“Now, something like that, once it’s up and really running, then we’ll break it to the world and say, ‘If we can get it right in that developing country, we can then move that same working mechanism into other countries and do the same thing,” he says.

In addition to running a packaging consultancy in Australia, Pienaar lectures master’s students in Food Innovation and Packaging at the University of Melbourne (Australia), Bond University (Australia), and over a dozen additional universities worldwide.

But he doesn’t stop there. For 16 years, he has visited the classrooms in his home state of Queensland, Australia, and explained packaging, the science of packaging, and the impact of not recycling it to children as young as rst grade. He anticipates his two-year-old granddaughter being his greatest student.

“I want to make a difference that when I retire, I can say, “’ Yep, it’s now working,’” he says.

Visit pwgo.to/7709 to read Pierre Pienaar’s recent Professional Perspective column in Packaging World, in which he lays out how and why packagers should prioritize sustainability.

Honoring Hall of Fame Careers:

Jeff Rhodehamel of Clemson University

The Packaging & Processing Hall of Fame is inducting four new members into its ranks in 2022. Jeff Rhodehamel joins the Hall of Fame with a unique combination of leadership experience in government, the private sector, and academia.

By Casey Flanagan, Editorial Assistant

Jeff Rhodehamel, PhD earns his spot in the Hall of Fame as a true food safety renaissance man. Between his work protecting public health in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, innovating package design at Sealed Air Corporation, and passing the torch to the next generation of food scientists at Clemson University, Rhodehamel has been a leader in just about any eld he has entered.

Rhodehamel grew up in Levittown, Pa. His father’s work eventually brought him to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., which he says led to a life “mostly south of the Mason-Dixon Line since then” and subsequently an education at Virginia Tech.

He found a special interest in pathogenic microbiology through a food microbiology class he took during his junior year. He earned his degree in microbiology and later earned both a Master’s and a PhD in food science and technology at Virginia Tech.

Working alongside his Major Professor, Dr. Merle Pierson, Rhodehamel focused his studies on anaerobic pathogens or germs that can survive without oxygen. “In a strange twist, that’s sort of how it got me eventually to packaging,” he says, as that type of pathogen is of particular concern with modi ed atmosphere packaging (MAP).

Rhodehamel’s rst foray into the “real world” was as a supervisor of microbiological and chemical laboratories at meat processing company Bil Mar Foods.

“There’s nothing like going from working in a microbiology lab to going to work in a meat slaughter facility,” he says. “It’s where I think I learned that there is book knowledge, and then there is real-world knowledge and [the] application of it.”

While Rhodehamel enjoyed his time at Bil Mar Foods, after about two years, he jumped at the opportunity to focus more on food safety as a microbiologist for the FDA. It brought Rhodehamel an overriding sense “that you did have an admirable mission to your work, and you felt you were making a difference.” He says he knew this job was different from the start, as “not many jobs do you take an oath when you get sworn in.”

During his seven years at the FDA, he led the organization’s Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) division, which sets regulations based on principles that ensure food safety from harvest to consumption. One of the focal points of his time leading this division was writing regulations to

apply HACCP principles to the seafood industry. Rhodehamel shifted gears back to the corporate world in 1995 with CRYOVAC®, which later merged with Sealed Air Corporation. He spent the next 18 years at the company and ultimately became executive director of global technology and innovation. He and his team designed several innovative packaging products over the years, including a post-pasteurization bag, ovenable rollstock, oxygen scavenging bag materials, and improved abuse-resistant red meat bags, many of which solved challenges raised by customers. While Rhodehamel did spearhead these innovations in his leadership role, he emphasized the importance of the team around him. “There’s very little innovation that happened as a result of a single individual that can bring it from start to nish; you really need a team effort,” he says. As a mentor for the new talent entering Sealed Air, he simultaneously dipped his toes into the academic world as an adjunct professor at Clemson University. The chance to teach full-time came toward the twilight of Rhodehamel’s career. “I thought it might be a wonderful opportunity to give back to the industry and start mentoring these students There’s very little innovation while still in academics,” he says. that happened as a result of Rhodehamel served as chair of the Department of Food, Nutrition, and Packaging Scienca single individual that can es at Clemson’s College of Agriculture, Forestry, bring it from start to nish; and Life Sciences (CAFLS) up to 2019. He has continued as a professor to this day, teaching classyou really need a team effort. es at CAFLS, as well as professional development and leadership course for juniors and seniors. Not one to limit his contributions to the packaging and food safety world, Rhodehamel has also thrown his hat in the ring at the International Association for Food Protection, the Institute of Food Technologists, and the National Turkey Federation. Backed by his combined experience climbing several organizational ranks and teaching the next generation to do the same, Rhodehamel advises, “you don’t need to be the absolute technical expert in every single aspect, but you rely on your teams to provide that.” And with an admirable sense of modesty, Rhodehamel drives the message home that “it’s really all the multitudes of great teams that I’ve worked with that really deserve the credit.” PW