This vegetable tray ticks (almost) all the boxes

Karen Davidson

Hand harvesting cauliflower is hard work. Heads are heavy. The vegetables are often moist. And the white florets are easily bruised.

All of that means the specification requirements for containers are daunting. Corrugated trays must be easy to assemble, strong enough for stacking, and durable enough not to sag with condensation going from hot fields to cold packing sheds. A new demand is for environmentally sustainable containers -- without wax – that can be repulped.

Moore Packaging Corporation was challenged by Hillside Gardens, a major vegetable grower in Ontario’s Holland Marsh, to design a better cauliflower tray that could stand up to these rigours of field harvest and go through the entire cold chain to the retail store.

“Our design and technical department worked on this for a year and launched the MooreGuard tray in 2022,” says Jeff Abbott, director of sales, Moore Packaging Corporation, Barrie, Ontario.

The end product is repulpable at the end of its life cycle – a key requirement of retailers who are looking to avoid landfills and to reduce waste disposal costs. But one of the most challenging design elements was to find a corrugated solution strong enough for the weight of vegetables but also coated with vegetable-based, water-soluble inks.

“The tricky part was formulating liners that were coatable and printable,” says Abbott. “They must be CFIA and FDA-compliant.”

Fortunately, the packaging company was able to source the wax replacement in Canada.

The new Moore-Guard tray can withstand going from hot to cold, cold to hot. In some instances, these trays go right to