ConAgra needed a package offering both purchase appeal and user convenience for its Ro*Tel Ready to Eat Queso Dip. It found the answer in a custom-molded polypropylene cup with a shrink label.

Here's a clever design in pouched microwavable heat-and-serve sauces and gravies. Royco sauces, from Master Foods, a division of Mars, in South Africa, are packaged in retorted pouches. Before microwave heating, the consumer snips the pouch corner for venting and pouring.

Home-meal replacement moves a notch higher in Sweden with environmentally friendly trays on ready-made meals from Gunnar Dafgard AB. Billy's Lasagne chilled meals come in molded wood-pulp packaging.

Sustainability is driving the excess from packaging materials, energy use, and waste. The challenge for brand owners will be to improve product protection and shelf impact while also using materials and technologies that lessen packaging's environmental impact.

The emphasis on convenience drives so many food packaging decisions today, and it may have a greater influence on the packages we see in the future than anything else out there. The following are new examples in the battle for shelf supremacy in convenience packaging:

Three microwavable aseptic-packaged sauces from Chef Creations are intended to attract time-pressed consumers who enjoy better foods with less preparation work.

Chef Creations offers alfredo sauce, hollandaise sauce, and a classic brown sauce in Tetra Wedge® containers from Tetra Pak. Chef Creations says the patented barrier-protection packaging protects the taste from spoiling while also offering the quick-meal solution of “microwave dining.”

Each package holds 6.75-oz of sauce, is shelf-stable, and protects the quality of the contents without the need for preservatives. Consumers can microwave the sauces right in the package, eliminating the step of pouring the sauce into a dish before heating in the microwave.

Link: Tetra Pak International USA

Foodservice company Raw Seafoods has plunged into retail markets with its Cape Cod Cuisine frozen foods, and Kane Kendall, Director of Marketing, says, “It’s been a totally different ballgame.”

With the laminated paperboard tray the company has chosen, the New Bedford, MA, fish packer is making an innovative splash in the dual-ovenable market. Eight products in the line use trays laminated with a polyester film of thin patterned aluminum, which harnesses and controls microwave energy by channeling it deeper into the frozen food for faster, more even heating. The tray technology comes from Graphic Packaging International.

The 8”x5 1/2”x1 5/8” tray is made from SBS board laminated with polyester/aluminum film. During microwave heating, the aluminum areas reflect the microwave energy into other areas while unshielded areas heat normally.

The complex honeycomb pattern of aluminum keeps edges from crisping while driving energy into the center of the entrée or other food product.

With packaging providing an ambient, nonrefrigerated shelf life of two years, a breakthrough new tray and lid combination is presenting a serious challenge to the steel can for cooked vegetables.

The package was conceived by Luc Fevrier, Category Manager at France-based retailer Carrefour, and the tray was produced by RPC Bebo UK. Lidding is supplied by LPF Flexible Packaging, and Gelagri Bretagne is the agricultural cooperative that packs the vegetables.

Gelagri packs into either two- or four-compartment breakaway trays that are sold in a printed paperboard sleeve with a die-cut window to allow the shopper to see the food inside.

Fevrier initially contacted RPC Bebo in December 2002 to develop the new packaging. In November 2003, the French retailer tested two items in the pack in 200-plus Carrefour stores. Called Conserves Pratiques, the new line is sold under the Carrefour brand in hypermarkets, Champion in supermarkets, and Grand Jury in local stores.

Microwave packaging is surging beyond the frozen dinner, due to the confluence of changing American lifestyles and advancing packaging technology. In frozen foods, sales of products in microwave packaging will grow 4.4% annually to 2008, forecasts Packaging Strategies Inc.

Opportunities: Look beyond frozen dinners and consider “walk-around” foods and desktop “dining” for hand-held foods, potpies, breakfast foods, pasta, soup, and chili. Consumers want smaller servings and true value-added packaging features.