Industry leaders make a case for metal packaging at Respack

Titled Metal Containers: A Green Packaging Media, the session was moderated by Amit Agarwal, chief of sales and marketing (tinplate) at Tata Steel Limited. The panel brought together forces from both the primary steel supply chain and container manufacturers to explain how metal behaves as a material that naturally eliminates structural waste, bypassing the multi-layer material crises plaguing competitive substrates.

Metal packaging and integrated R&D infrastructure
Ramanathan Balasubramanian of JSW Steel Coated Products illustrated the core promise of metal preservation with a verified news anecdote regarding an elderly couple who opened a 50-year-old can of chicken to find the meat perfectly preserved. “What seems like simple news has a big story behind it,” Balasubramanian said. “For a testimony like this, you need to have the right steel, the right equipment, the right can maker, the right coatings and inks, and the right food technology that knows how to pack it.”

Balasubramanian pointed out that steel possesses critical barrier properties natively, eliminating the need for complex engineering or energy-intensive supply chains. He highlighted that canned goods do not require cold chain logistics to safely transport nutrition across a continent. “Today, to move any food product from one end of the country to the other, you need to invest heavily in a food chain, which is highly energy-consuming. Once it is sealed, it is sealed for good.”

He identified this as a critical weapon to combat India’s massive food waste epidemic, calling the current volume of agricultural and seafood spoilage a “criminal offence” given that the packaging technology to halt it already exists. He urged the market to abandon myopic unit-cost comparisons and adopt lifecycle cost analysis that factors environmental impacts directly into product choices.

To bridge the operational silos separating steel makers, can manufacturers, and food brands, Balasubramanian announced JSW’s launch of a packaging R&D laboratory in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. The facility will bring together food technologists, coating experts, and can makers to provide certified, end-to-end packaging solutions for any product format. 

The operational superiority of two-piece DRD cans
Providing a specialised manufacturing lens, Kaushal Vora of Massily India Packaging, highlighted the structural and safety advantages of two-piece draw and redraw (DRD) metal cans. Vora noted that family-run frameworks allow the company to invest 7% of its turnover back into continuous infrastructure improvements, insulated from the short-term margin pressures of financially driven operations.

Vora detailed the engineering behind two-piece cans, which are stamped and drawn from a single piece of tinplate rather than welded along a side seam. “It minimises the leakage risk because there are fewer ends. There is only one end. There are no two ends like a three-piece. Less joints, less risk,” Vora explained. Furthermore, unlike aluminium, tinplate allows for high-precision offset lithographic printing, allowing brands to apply intricate stretch-printed designs over the can geometry prior to the draw phase.

To prove the commercial viability of the format, Vora presented a ready-to-eat (RTE) case study modelled against top Indian brands like MTR and Mother’s Recipe. He demonstrated that a thick-gravy, 900-gram regional meal packed in a two-piece can breaks down to INR 17 per person.

Vora also detailed Massily India’s manufacturing localisation and automation initiatives across its plants in Sahibabad, Manesar, and Sri City, including an advanced aerosol plant equipped with robotic packaging cells capable of boxing 24 cans in nine seconds. 

He revealed that Massily is rolling out India’s first PVC-non-intent (PVC-NI) lining system alongside a six-colour UV LED printing line. Additionally, the company is bridging the gap between traditional metals and artificial intelligence by embedding Digimarc invisible digital identifiers into can graphics to protect premium export-oriented seafood brands from counterfeiting.

Three-piece can innovation, thinner gauges, and food safety regulations
Saket Bhatia of Hindustan Tin Works focused on the evolution of three-piece metal cans. Bhatia tackled the reality of India’s booming consumption footprint, noting that per capita packaging consumption has risen to 16-kilograms. However, with packaging representing roughly 30% of municipal solid waste, he defended metal’s financial viability in keeping itself completely out of landfills.

Bhatia praised the informal domestic recycling chain driven by ragpickers and scrap traders, noting that the strong intrinsic scrap value of steel ensures nearly 100% reclamation. “You would never find a piece of metal in the garbage because of the value it gives,” Bhatia stated. “For metal packaging, we call it the cradle-to-cradle option: once a metal, always a metal; if you throw a can in a bin, it becomes steel again without losing the original properties.”

Bhatia highlighted technical leaps in line efficiency and down-gauging. Modern steel cans easily handle lightning-fast filling speeds of up to 500 cans per minute, outpacing slower flexible pouch or carton filling systems. On the material side, Hindustan Tin Works has driven down-gauging initiatives over the past two years, reducing a standard one-kilo can wall from 0.24-mm thickness down to a highly efficient 0.19-mm, with goals to reach global benchmarks of 0.15-mm as domestic can-fillers upgrade their seaming operations.

He also addressed upcoming Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) compliance mandates, detailing the company’s shift toward advanced, imported BPA-free and PFAS-free coatings, while exploring steel lamination technologies pioneered in Japan and China as a superior, corrosion-resistant alternative to traditional lacquering.