“The business case comes down to brands being fit for purpose for the future” – Nestlé on the packaging changes for KitKat and Quality Street

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Nestlé is changing the wrappers used on KitKat chocolate bars and Quality Street chocolates in the UK and Ireland in a bid to make them more environmentally-friendly. The company said the move on Quality Street – which sees the double layer of foil and cellulose replaced with a paper wrap – will eliminate more than three billion pieces of packaging from its supply chain. 

For KitKat, Nestlé will introduce wrappers made with 80% recycled plastic which can be recycled at more than 5,000 supermarkets across the UK and through household recycling in Ireland. The company claims the move means KitKat will “use the highest proportion of recycled food-grade plastic of any major UK and Ireland confectionery brand”. 

Cheryl Allen: Investing in these type of materials aligns with what our global CEO has said in the past and to some extent it builds on what we did on Smarties last year when we moved to paper across the board.

Yes, it’s the development and evolution of that sustainable packaging approach and it needed multiple iterations to get it right. We needed to make sure the paper was the right spec for the material it was intending to cover. We knew we needed to retain the product quality and safety. You have to be really careful to make sure it is still fit for purpose and you don’t end up with the unintended consequences of causing problems elsewhere. Quality Street wrappers were suitable for home composting but a very small percentage of the population have access to that so we needed to use a different material.

Yes, the risk of having pure paper is that you might see the fat migrate through. We needed the vegetable coating to ensure nothing from the product leaks through.

For Quality Street, we made some modifications in Halifax [in northern England] where it is made but there hasn’t been a large-scale investment. There has been more capital expenditure in relation to the KitKat changes. [Richard Watson, business executive officer at Nestlé Confectionery in the UK described the changes as a “significant upgrade” to the company’s York factory but did not reveal the investment cost. Nestlé has previously said it is investing up CHF2bn (US$2.01bn) to shift from virgin plastics to food-grade recycled plastics and to “accelerate the development of innovative sustainable packaging solutions”].

On Quality Street, the move is to be recyclable. At this moment in time, you can’t use recycled paper for food-grade packaging. It is virgin paper and fully recyclable. In the case of KitKat the announcement is around the use of recycled plastic. In Ireland, they recycle such [soft] plastic at the household level but not in the UK. But there are 5,000 collection points at stores in the UK [including at branches of Tesco, Sainsbury's, The Co-op, Aldi and Waitrose].

Since the collection points have been introduced, the volume is growing every month and has exceeded the expectations of the stores. That is creating an encouraging proof point and creating a habit. The UK government is committed to kerbside collection of this soft plastic by March 2027 and some local authorities are starting to get on board. [Cheltenham and South Gloucestershire in south-west England are the first local authorities to agree to trial kerbside collections of flexible plastic packaging under the Flexible Plastic Fund (FPF) FlexCollect project. Nestlé has also partnered with Scottish recycling business Yes Recycling to process hard-to-recycle plastics and is investing GBP1.7m (US$1.9m) in a plastic recycling plant there].

We are using sustainably-sourced paper. We looked at the impact of the old packaging versus alternative materials and were guided by life-cycle assessments which demonstrated a positive environmental impact. [Nestlé says those assessments show the new KitKat wrappers will reduce the carbon footprint of two-finger packaging by about 20% when compared with the existing materials. For Quality Street, the new wrappers represent half the carbon footprint of the foil and cellulose wrappers].

Littering wasn’t the issue that was uppermost in our minds. It was more our commitment to recyclable or re-useable materials by 2025.

The business case comes down to brands being fit for purpose for the future and delivering the kinds of solutions consumers like to see. There have been lots of studies on sustainability and the hot topics for consumers are around packaging, waste and recycling. Making Quality Street widely recyclable makes it more relevant.

That’s our aspiration although it’s way too early to know. Quality Street is rolling out already. It’s a major change project for the facility in Halifax and the transition will take several months. There will be a bit of a mix of old and new this Christmas but it will be fully implemented by Christmas 2023. KitKat’s new wrappers are being produced now and will be up and running soon on the two-finger products. [The initiative will be extended across the entire KitKat range by 2024].

Quality Street has one global production location so effectively it will also be for the export market. With KitKat, there is an appetite for this across Europe and we are just firming up timings at the moment.

It would be very difficult to make generalisations. Sustainable solutions are often seen as more expensive but those solutions can come in the shape of better value and could save people money. Businesses have lots of costs to manage but Nestlé has an unswerving commitment to sustainability goals. There are no additional costs [to consumers] from this sustainability initiative. Although it is costing our business more, we are finding ways to absorb those costs.