Uflex’s Flexfresh Waterless Internet Flower Packaging earned top prize as a breakthrough process innovation in manufacturing and services from the All India Management Association (AIMA). The award was recently presented at AIMA’s Innovation Practitioners Summit.
Flexfresh is a patented polymeric film engineered by Uflex which works on the principle of active modified atmospheric packaging (AMAP). Flexfresh, while maintaining the humidity inside the bag at around 95 percent, keeps the product dry without allowing condensation. This results in very low weight loss of the produce as it continues to breathe in hydrated oxygen available inside the bag. The ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide inside the bag remains at equilibrium. The film provides good release characteristics of CO2 emitted by the produce. This ensures that the produce can be protected naturally from disease. Flexfresh film is also biodegradable by composting.
Accepting the award on behalf of Uflex was N. Siva Shankaran, vice president, Flexfresh.
“Flexfresh is promoting the use of flexible packaging by saving fresh produce from spoilage over an extended period of time,” he says. “Shelf life extension reduces wastage of fresh produce, which otherwise is a rampant phenomenon in the supply chain. It has been proven beyond reasonable doubt that flexible packaging entails only 10 percent of the total energy consumed for producing food. Therefore the trade-off benefits that are derived in terms of savings by the virtue of preventing wastage of fresh produce (which is a nuisance) make the overall proposition quite lucrative.”
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