Drinks pouches have been around since the 1960s, but now the format is taking off as brands strive to bring new ideas to a changing market, says Simeon Goldstein

When Vimto looked to target its fruit drink at teenagers earlier this year, a resealable pouch with a twist cap was chosen as the best way to capture the potential audience. The ‘squeeze and crush' concept was well received for the on-the-go format. Vimto's trials showed "kids loved the way they can easily use and reseal the pouch".

Yet using pouches in the soft drinks market is nothing new. After all, Capri-Sun has been doing it for decades. But it is clear that a funky-looking pack is a good way to get children to consume something that is good for them. "There are not many products that children want and their mothers are confident in," says Julia Savas, global marketing manager at Wild, the German firm that created Capri-Sun in 1969. "This pack is a lot of fun for kids."

But it is not just children who can have fun with drinks in pouches. Indeed, a South African firm is now using them for its wine range. Some might consider using this packaging format for wine sacrilegious, but the Company of Wine People says part of the reason for choosing a pouch for its Arniston Bay and Versus wines is precisely to break the status quo. "We challenged ourselves to tackle the accusation of lack of innovation that had often been levelled at the wine industry. Using a pouch is clearly innovative," says chief executive Hermann Böhmer.

Flexible format
The firm says a pouch is ideal for on-the-go, outdoor consumption, like a picnic, as it is easy to squeeze into a hamper, can be cooled quickly and will squash down to reduce the waste to carry home. The wine's shelf life is upwards of nine months, and once it is opened it can be resealed and stored.

One of the drawbacks to many pouches is the fact that a multilayer film can be difficult to recycle, but the manufacturers are swift to defend the overall environmental credentials. "The big advantage is the low consumption of resources," says Erhard Schwartz, who oversees Capri-Sun technical development at Wild.

A pouch could also be squashed to a very small size if it were to end up as landfill, but perhaps the greenest disposal would be to send the pouches to an energy-from-waste facility. While there is not much material, which could make it a costly exercise, there is nevertheless scope to use pouches as fuel. "There's energy in the crude oil that's used to make the plastic part of the film and it's quite easy to regain that. The first life of our product is plastic packaging; the second one could be as fuel," says Schwartz.

Not all pouches, though, are made from multilayered film. Dutch firms Smartpack International and Dolphin Water sell a water pouch that uses a ‘tear and sip' system instead of a straw. The pouch is made solely from PET and the firm is targeting the product at events such as music festivals and football matches. "People can put the pouch into their pocket and it won't drip," says Simon Roberts of UK supplier GFT Retail. "At the end of the event there's 90% less waste as the pouch can be squashed." GFT acknowledges that the downturn has affected the bottled water market, but says that government initiatives to reduce packaging could help. "With everyone worrying about landfill, a pouch is an ideal way to reduce costs," says Roberts.

HOW CAPRI-SUN SHONE
Capri-Sun has been a staple of children's lunchboxes for the past four decades, and it is showing no sign of disappearing - market share in countries like Germany, the US and the UK is more than 30%. The choice of packaging is clearly integral to the product's success. Indeed, the laminate foil pouch with a straw has virtually become the symbol of the brand.

"You won't find any one packaging material in the market that gives the same properties as laminate film," says Capri-Sun creator Wild's Erhard Schwartz. The pouch consists of three layers, two polyethylene layers sandwiching an aluminium-foil one. It is 0.1mm thick. "If you select specialist materials to meet your packaging requirements, you can reduce the thickness to an absolute minimum," he says.

A flexible pouch is more difficult to fill than a rigid plastic bottle, but the firm addressed this at an early stage of development. "The machines available when we started out didn't meet our requirements," says Schwartz. The solution? Build its own packaging machine. All Capri-Sun drinks are now processed using custom technology. "It's taken us a while to learn how to deal with the packs, but our machines now work to our requirements," says Schwartz.