Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses have spent the last three-anda-half years working on the transition away from nonrecyclable plastic packaging. Packaging technologist Katie Shepherd has worked with Ian Schofield to lead the charge, and explains the challenges and achievements on the road to new beginnings. Sustainability has always been at theheart of the company – it’s part of theethos. It’s a farming family, andeverythinghas tobe sustainable. But sustainablepackaging hadnot reallybeenon the agenda until the last three-and-a-half years, sincewhen wehave comeon leaps andbounds. Becausewe care sodeeply, wehavegone headlong toconvert thewhole company togoon this journey, andnowwe’re leading themarket. Cheese is oneof themost complicated packaging formats you canhave. Wehave a livingproduct – cheese is still breathing andmaturing.Wehave tomake surewedon’t degrade thatwith packaging changes and keep thequality of our product high. It is amassive task. It’smademore complicatedbecausewe have threemain types of cheese – soft cheese, hard cheese andblue cheese. The cheeses all havedifferent characteristics, differentmaturing stages, all needdifferent breathability rates. The packaging that had been around them, had been there for the 40 years since the business started. It has lots of chemicals around it which can’t be recycled. Now the packaging we use can be recycled, and it was a real challenge to get to that stage. No-one really thought about the packaging before, now it’s done at the same time as the product development. We’ve made it part of everyone’s job. There can be downward pressure from the board saying ‘you have to get on with that’, but that only goes so far. We all need to be on the same page for things to work, you have to believe in what you are doing – it’s for our teammembers’ future, their children’s future. Once everyone understands that, we have had nothing but cooperation. The packaging is much better for the environment now, but for themost part it doesn’t look any different to how it did four years ago. We have been able to keep the same format, using the samemachines. This has kept the costs down, andmade our goals realistic and achievable. Our first step was to have packaging that can be recycled. That’s what we’ve done. None of the packaging could be recycled before, but now every single one of our items can be recycled. Our next stage is to get out of plastics entirely. Consumers don’t want plastic, sowe’re working really hard on testing newmaterials for shelf-life, distribution and all those things. Things aremoving at a rate of knots. More people nowwant to buy British and want sustainability – we canmeet themon all sides. Already, we are planning for Christmas this year and next year, to make sure we are more sustainable than we are now. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 25 BEFORE AFTER Katie Shepherd is a packaging technologist at Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses, an independent family business based near Preston. She holds a BSc Business Studies degree from Lancaster University Management School. Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses are a partner organisation for the Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives project. They are working on research, trials, and communication with suppliers and customers to move away from non-recyclable plastic packaging, towards recyclable and non-plastic options for everything they supply.
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