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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food packaging

New Food Containers Promise to Keep French Fries Warm and Crispy

One easy way to ruin a relaxed takeout dinner at home are soggy french fries that lack a satisfying crunch when you eat them.

Novolex, a 16-year-old maker of packaging for the food, medical and building industries, hopes to prevent this food catastrophe with its new EcoCraft Fresh & Crispy clamshell containers, which it said in a press release keeps fried foods warm and crunchy. The containers do that with “micro-flute corrugation for superior rigidity and crush strength to maintain food integrity during transport and delivery.” Micro-flutes are the wavy paper in packaging that commonly protect all those items you order online.

“These containers even keep french fries crispy, warm and tasty,” said Adrianne Tipton, senior vice president of innovation at Novolex, in the release. “That’s a real innovation in food delivery.”

The company said the containers are designed for restaurants, convenience stores, supermarkets, caterers and delivery services, and are made with a minimum of 33 percent post-consumer recycled content.

A request for more information from Novolex was not returned by press time, so we don’t know when these containers will be available and how much they cost compared to other containers.

Better food containers are much needed now, as delivery apps are becoming more popular, even spurring the creation of ghost restaurants, which exist solely to serve delivery customers. Bloomberg cited data by market-data firm App Annie that food delivery app downloads have increased 380 percent compared to three years ago. DoorDash leads the pack, with Grubhub and Uber Eats not too far behind.

Another company, aptly named Soggy Food Sucks, also offers a solution to the problem with a condensation absorbing patch that can stick to the food containers.

Hopefully, with these innovations in place, you’ll only have a bad feeling about fries when you eat too many of them.

Microwaveable Crispy Bacon is Now Within Reach Thanks to This Heroic Packaging

Crispy bacon lovers, your day has come. (Flimsy bacon lovers, who are you and what is your problem?!)

The U.K. company Sirane has created a package that will make microwaveable bacon consistently crispy — no more sandwiching between paper towels or messy grease splatters (h/t FoodDive).

In a press release, Sirane explained that the package absorbs hot grease from the pork as it cooks, which creates the crispy results. On the surface, this is a pretty mundane invention. But Sirane says that the packaging is actually quite versatile (though still admittedly bacon-centric): it can be sold as a sealed pack with a particular brand of bacon, or people can purchase the packs themselves and add their own preferred bacon at home. They’re also planning to sell the packaging to restaurants and cafés looking to up their microwaveable bacon game.

It’s sort of ironic that a U.K.-based company came up with this innovation since, at least in my experience, Brits like their bacon on the thicker, chewier side. But nobody likes an undercooked rasher — or a messy microwave cleanup. This packaging will surely lead to a lot more bacon butties for all.

Photo: Sirane