Respack: Paper and paperboard eye breakout into food packaging

"Who actually decides what gets recycled in India today? Anyone from the audience who would like to give me an answer?” With this opening question, Sakshi Chandak, business head at Pakka Limited, shifted the dialogue at Respack 2026 to the stark realities of urban waste management. Her answer: the humble kabariwala that collects scrap packaging from households. 

Speaking at the focus session titled 'Paper & Paperboard: An Innovative Sustainable Packaging Materials', Chandak argued that the local waste picker, equipped with a simple hand scale at 7 am, remains the most honest auditor the packaging industry has today.  

"He is not reading any of the EPR filings that we do," Chandak observed. "He does not care about any of the Green New Deal rules. All he does is ask one simple question before he picks up any piece of packaging, and that is: is it worth picking up?"

While cardboard boxes, PET bottles, and aluminium cans pass this one-second economic audit, mass-market multi-layer plastic wrappers are systematically left behind. Chandak pointed out that while these wrappers perform brilliantly on the shelf, they become absolutely worthless the minute they are empty. "So we don't just fail to recycle them," she stated. "We have designed a product that is almost always ignored."  

Confronting the flexible laminate challenge
The dilemma is magnified by the absolute dominance of flexible substrates in the domestic market, where roughly 70% of all Indian packaging is flexible, multi-layer packaging. While acknowledging that flexibles have made food accessible to millions due to their lightweight properties and protective performance, Chandak explained that their multi-layer architecture makes mechanical separation functionally impossible.  

To bypass the need for a waste picker's intervention entirely, Pakka has focused on designing regenerative structures built for the soil rather than the landfill. utilising bagasse—the fibrous residue left from sugarcane production—the company has commercialised Flexi, a certified compostable, three-layer flexible packaging structure.

The monomaterial alternative combines a base paper layer for structural strength and printability, a middle metallisation layer for high-barrier properties, and a final biomaterial film for sealing. Chandak revealed that the structure achieves a water vapour transmission rate (WVTR) of less than 2 and an oxygen transmission rate (OTR) of less than 10, protecting oil- and nut-heavy products like chocolates and protein bars for a 12-month ambient shelf life without requiring any specialised machinery modifications from brand owners.

Furthermore, the company is in the final stages of developing a completely non-metallised barrier structure to strip out the metal layer entirely while maintaining equivalent protective performance.

Marrying chemistry with plant-based fibres
The technical foundations of paper barrier performance were earlier outlined by the session chairman, Dr Ashok Kumar, executive director of Pudumjee Paper Products Limited. Kumar noted that while paper lacks the natural barrier characteristics of polymers or glass, it remains an incredibly versatile plant fibre that can be chemically and mechanically modified directly on the paper machine. 

"Paper as a substrate has been coated with different poly-based materials and used for several applications," Kumar explained. "But now there has been an opportunity for the last couple of years so that it can be used for higher barrier end-use applications."  

According to Kumar, the immediate technical hurdle is an optimisation problem: building distinct characteristics like opacity and fluid resistance into the paper web during the pulping and size-press stages without dragging down machine production speeds.

"The challenge is to find out the right kind of chemicals which can be very well married with the paper," Kumar noted, emphasising that achieving high-end barrier performance inevitably requires advanced, multi-layer aqueous or functional coatings that preserve the substrate's inherent biodegradability and high global recycling rates.  

Connecting aesthetics with performance
Presenting a corporate perspective on high-performance paperboard, Rajesh Voruganti, general manager of product development at ITC Limited’s packaging and printing business, demonstrated how structural design can successfully eliminate plastic intensity while elevating brand premiumness.

Voruganti argued that modern packaging must evolve beyond simple preservation to embrace digital connectivity, smart tracking, and explicit environmental responsibility.  

Voruganti highlighted a series of commercial collaborations where ITC has replaced conventional plastics with highly engineered paperboard solutions. Through a partnership with Frugalpac, ITC helped introduce India’s first paper bottle, a structure that is five times lighter than standard glass and delivers a six times lower carbon footprint.

The format allows consumers to split the outer paperboard shell from the inner plastic pouch post-use, directing them into separate recycling streams.  

For the fast-growing quick-service restaurant (QSR) and takeaway sectors, ITC developed a specialised poly-free and PFAS-free honeycomb wrapper designed for superior heat retention and grease resistance. Addressing the common problem of product sogginess in delivery channels, Voruganti detailed a custom container designed for Burger King.

By conducting localised store testing, his team engineered custom moisture vents that allow entrapped steam to escape, preventing condensation while retaining heat.  

Voruganti also noted a design shift where brands are opting for uncoated, natural textures—such as using the raw structure of the board on a visible face—to directly communicate sustainability to consumers. "Paperboard is a sustainable solution while films continue to have their relevance," Voruganti concluded.

"Films play a major role in the packaging world... but packaging through board and packaging through all the bells and whistles that we have been discussing could actually play a larger role while simplifying the intensity of packaging that we use."  

Learning from nature
Concluding the panel, Ved Krishna, chief executive officer of Pakka Limited, urged scientists and brand owners to abandon the practice of simply mimicking plastic structures when designing paper alternatives.

Krishna argued that aiming to design a multi-layer plastic laminate along the same lines as a multi-layer paper laminate sets the design bar too low, resulting in products that perform poorly and cost too much.  

"We are obsessed as an organisation to work towards a cleaner planet," Krishna stated, adding that impactful change can only be achieved by working at scale. He explained that the company’s current research is heavily focused on the food delivery sector, where hot and oily Indian dishes present a severe technical challenge for natural materials.

"Typically, steam will find a tortuous path, and in India, most of the food is hot and oily," Krishna said. "So what happens is when you have a natural substance, it tends to get soggy."  

Rather than turning to synthetic coatings, Krishna advocated for a design philosophy deeply inspired by the simplicity of nature, which relies on a very small selection of carbohydrates, proteins, and sugars to build highly functional barrier systems.

To scale this philosophy, Pakka is currently developing a specialised paper manufacturing process designed to utilise the natural properties of sugarcane fibres. The objective is to produce an extremely non-porous, highly dense base paper that exhibits unique, natural see-through characteristics without relying on intensive synthetic chemical interventions.

"We are coming up with something that we have designed from scratch in terms of a new way to make paper," Krishna revealed. "The paper will hopefully be something so non-porous that it has not been seen before."