SIG Foundation has announced that it has received international recognition for its project “Cartons for Good.”
The prize, which is awarded annually by the SAVE FOOD initiative, was recently presented to the Foundation in Cairo at pacprocess MEA.
The award-winning project uses SIG’s expertise in filling technology to help communities process and preserve their food into meals locally.
The company shared that the prize money will be invested in a comprehensive and locally based study to ensure that the impact of Cartons for Good in Egypt is as high as possible.
The SIG Foundation’s Cartons for Good project, which has been operating in Bangladesh since 2019, and has seen SIG engineers develop a system that uses the company’s boil-down technology to preserve food in SIG SafeBloc carton packs.
Vegetables and fruit are processed into meals without preservatives and filled into carton packs.
This means the meals can be stored at ambient conditions for up to nine months without refrigeration. The aim of the foundation is to expand “Cartons for Good” to other parts of the world.
Holger Dickers, Managing Director of the Swiss-based foundation, commented: “We are honored to receive the SAVE FOOD Award. Cartons for Good is the foundation’s flagship project. It is a unique initiative designed to help communities to save surplus food, support farmers’ livelihoods, and promote children’s nutrition and education.”
The SAVE FOOD initiative, launched in 2011 by Messe Düsseldorf, interpack and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is committed to reducing the vast quantities of food that are lost or wasted worldwide every day.
This year, the SAVE FOOD initiative launched a competition to find projects that tackle this goal in innovative ways. The winner has been announced as part of the pacprocess MEA to be held jointly with Food Africa in Cairo from 12 to 14 December 2023. Both trade fairs are part of the interpack alliance portfolio.
In Egypt, 50 per cent of all fruit and vegetables are wasted, this means 73 kgs of food waste per person per year. At the same time, 32.5 per cent of Egyptians live below the poverty line, and one in five children under five years of age is stunted.
“The support from SAVE FOOD will be invested in a comprehensive and locally based study to achieve the highest possible impact in Egypt with our initiative”, said Sandra Hallaschka, Co-Project Leader of Cartons for Good at SIG Foundation.
The study’s objectives are to identify the regions in Egypt where large quantities of freshly produced food are regularly lost and are not able to be sold to consumers through the established commercial supply chain. It will also focus on the benefits of healthy meals, and will develop recipes that are localised, consider the the seasonality of vegetables, and the right nutritional value for the beneficiaries.
The SIG Foundation has already taken the first steps towards implementing Cartons for Good in Egypt.
On September 29, the Foundation signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the NRCP Foundation (Natural Resources and Climate Protection Foundation) to pave the way for the project’s launch in Egypt. The first phase of the agreement includes securing funding and project planning in Egypt.