Poutine just might be one of the messiest snack foods known to humankind.
That also, apparently, makes it the ideal way to test new, environmentally friendly packaging.
The gravy and cheese curd-laden mass of fries will be front and centre next year as KFC launches a trial with bamboo packaging. Eventually, the bamboo buckets could hold everything from the company’s fried chicken to french fries and chicken strips. But first up? Canada’s goopy, rich snack food icon.
“If it can handle the poutine, it can handle other things,” said KFC Canada president and general manager Nivera Wallani as the company announced a trial to begin in early 2020.
KFC has 650 restaurants across Canada, including 190 in Ontario. The company has committed to sourcing all of its fibre-based packaging from certified or recycled sources by next year. It also promised to remove all plastic straws and bags from its restaurants before the end of this year.
Wallani, who said KFC Canada has been working on the project for six months, wanted to make sure the new packaging was solid enough to hold the gravy and melted cheese, but breathable enough to let some moisture escape so the fries wouldn’t go soggy. (The existing poutine bucket is made out of black polypropylene and the current chicken bucket is made out of polyethylene coated paper.)
“There’s sustainability, and there’s food integrity. We needed to find something that would work with both,” said Wallani.
While there’s sometimes a concern that new packaging doesn’t do as good a job as the existing stuff, in the case of bamboo, it’s actually better than paper for deep-fried foods, because its breathability allows steam to escape, preserving that crunch factor.
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“Styrofoam was really the ideal. But most fast food places aren’t using it any more because of sustainability problems. Bamboo comes much closer than paper,” said Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of the agri-food analytics lab at Dalhousie University.
Packaging has always been a problem for poutine producers, said Charlebois, who’s writing a history of the calorie-laden snack food, called “Poutine Nation.”
“This not a new problem. Packaging has been an issue for poutine for 50 years. When it first came out, they’d put the gravy in a separate container so the fries didn’t get too soggy,” Charlebois said.
Poutine is also less risky a way for KFC to put the new packaging through its paces, because it’s less central to the company’s brand, Charlebois said.
“If it doesn’t work, there’s less damage to the brand. Their brand is about chicken. As soon as you change the material, you don’t know how it’s going to react,” Charlebois added.
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Bamboo is more readily available than some other sustainable packaging options, meaning that there shouldn’t be any problems lining up suppliers for a wider rollout, Charlebois said.
“Bamboo is low-hanging fruit. It’s there, it’s available, it’s dirt cheap, and you can do a lot of different things with it,” said Charlebois.
Still, while it’s dirt cheap relative to other sustainable options, bamboo packaging is still roughly twice as expensive as traditional paper containers, Charlebois said.
KFC says there won’t be any price increase because of the new packaging, but there could be a problem if the company decides to tweak its pricing in the future, said York University marketing professor Alan Middleton.
“In survey after survey, when they’re asked about sustainable packaging or other green initiatives, people say ‘I’d rather do it, but I’m not prepared to pay a premium, or at least not much of one,’” said Middleton.
Still, there’s a marketing value in having environmentally sustainable packaging, Middleton said, particularly when a company announces its plans bit by bit, rather than a giant effort all at once.
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“There’s reputational value to be gained by doing this. Even if people get sick of hearing every little announcement, it eventually sinks in that ‘ooh, those guys are trying,’” said Middleton.
The fast food industry is struggling to deal with just how quickly the demand for environmentally sustainable packaging has grown, Charlebois said.
“This caught a lot of the big chains by surprise. They really weren’t expecting the reaction to be so visceral and so quick. Two or three years ago, nobody really spoke about it,” Charlebois said.
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November 06, 2019 at 04:27AM
