The National Food Lab (The NFL, www.TheNFL.com), a consulting and testing firm, expands its product and process development capabilities by offering Tetra Pak’s Tetra Recart® retortable cartons in its R&D Pilot Plant.

Tetra Recart by Tetra Pak is a retortable carton package designed for use with shelf-stable products containing particulates of almost any size. With four available sizes, including 200, 340, 390, and 500ml volumes, it offers a variety of advantages; including portability, ease of opening, and convenient space saving stackability. Tetra Recart is a truly sustainable packaging solution for today and tomorrow. It delivers a high level of food safety, with no compromise on product quality and flavor. Processing Tetra Recart packages in The NFL’s Allpax Stretch 2402 R & D retort allows The NFL to identify the optimal combination of processing parameters. This leads to several benefits for clients: the development of high quality products; identifying efficient cooking times; minimizing conversion costs; and increased speed to market.

“Tetra Recart by Tetra Pak is the perfect package to process in our existing Allpax retort. By having both pieces of equipment within our NFL pilot plant and Process Development group, we continue to bolster our breadth of value-added solutions to clients to fulfill our mission: enabling our clients to develop commercially safe, high quality and great tasting products,” says Kevin Waters, President & CEO of The NFL.

Terry Berman, Division Manager of Process Development at The NFL, says, “Combining Tetra Recart® with our existing agitating retort capabilities in The NFL’s, FDA registered pilot plant means that we can offer faster time-to-market for products and potentially better sterilization solutions in a new, cutting edge, cost efficient, environmentally friendly package. Companies can now use a single location to get all this work done, not two or three as they may have done in the past. They can have the use of unique packages, flexible production, and multiple retorts at their fingertips, while working with a credentialed NFL staff with advanced degrees and decades of years of industry experience. For product developers, it is important to be able to evaluate new and exciting packaging in a way that simulates commercial operation and to be able to rely on The NFL as a processing authority to evaluate the efficacy of the retort process.”