The Bridge Talk #9 – Annika Olsson

The packaging – a necessary pain? Myths and truths about packaging.

Food waste is a major challenge for society and for the food industry. Only in Sweden we spend 1.2 million tonnes of food each year, which leads to negative environmental impacts. Everyone uses food packaging daily and many have opinions on packaging and are not very rarely also frustrated by them. At the same time as packaging has several important features to contain our food.

The primary task of packaging is to protect and preserve our food products, but it is more often talked about packaging as a contributing factor to scrapping and resource solving. What role does the packaging actually play to reduce food winnings? And how we can raise awareness about the role of packaging for food and environment?

Annika Olsson is a new proprietor of Bo Rydin’s Professor in Packaging Logistics at Lund University. She is researching packaging innovation for sustainable development and teaching in packaging technology and development. Annika has many years of experience in the food and packaging industry before she began her research.