“Saving food is the most sustainable activity for our society as it will lead to overall savings in the use of every input from seeds, to fertilizer, water and energy. The delivery of better nutrition to the largest part of the population will also be a huge stride for sustainability since it will increase overall health and productivity.” – Debabrata Deb, packaging technology expert and speaker at the PDIT conference.
IppStar, with its long history of organizing nuts-and-bolts conferences across India, is organizing the Packaging Design Innovation Technology (PDIT) conference at PackTech 2016. The conference, organized in partnership with Messe Dusseldorf India in Mumbai, is not the usual packaging conference with back-to-back lectures from marketing executives but rather an attempt to knowledgeably address and interact on the difficult themes of food security and the environment together with the excitement of design, new innovations and technologies in packaging particularly as they pertain to food.
The conference will be addressed by Werner Dornscheidt, president and chief executive officer of Messe Dusseldorf, and one of the main founders and initiators of the Save Food movement, who will present the keynote speech. The initial findings of the FAO and Messe Dusseldorf sponsored study on food wastage in India will be presented by Venu Gopal Chintada and will focus on food losses in Andhra Pradesh. The case study on food losses and potential solutions will cover the rice, milk, mango and chickpea value chain in the southern Indian state.
The design sessions will begin with Gerard Caron, head of the Pentawards jury, presenting some leading packaging design trends and award-winning solutions of past years. Discussions will address the Save Food issues in a presentation by Rob Vermeulen and an interaction with a panel of packaging designers and packaging development team leaders from the brand owner’s end. Vermeulen is an advisor to non-profit organizations around the world and was one of the featured speakers at Save Food Congress at Interpack 2014.
The key issue at the conference is that the design and innovation discussion must be informed not only in light of the food supply chain that prevails in India but also in light of the consumer and technology trends that can sustainably improve it. Vermeulen, when I met him recently at the K exhibition in Dusseldorf, was rather keen on decoding the Indian food supply chain.
The sustainability discussion at the PDIT conference will be led by Swati Singh Sambyal of the Centre for Science and Environment, whose recent contribution to the zero landfill movement has tried to take on the nation’s indiscriminate production of 62 million tonnes of municipal solid waste each year. Deepak Manchanda, who wrote an open letter to prime minister Modi in our pages suggesting that Swachh Bharat should also address packaging waste, will talk about some of the simple structural issues in recycling of packaging waste. Bill Perell of PopPack will address sustainability from the innovator’s point of view in his presentation on consumer-driven sustainable solutions in packaging.
Prabodh Halde of Marico will speak on the compliance and safety issues of food packaging while Sukhdev Singh Saini of General Mills will present innovations and trends in new packaging materials and technologies. Debabrata Deb, a leading expert in Indian flexible packaging, will speak on “Why India needs active packaging!”
The PDIT conference is an attempt to move the industry’s conversations to a new level by tackling the intertwined themes of safety, health and environment together with the opportunities that packaging design and technology present to agriculture, industry and the service sector. How can we transition the world’s second largest producer of fruit and vegetables and the largest producer of milk into a society of nutritional abundance with creative, innovative and sustainable food production, processing and packaging?
The solutions are connected and may lead to a virtuous spiral of interaction and action. We hope to attract packaging designers and developers, brand owners, government and institutional movers and shakers, as well as the community of packaging technology providers, experts and packaging converters themselves.
To register for the conference please go to www.ippstar.org or contact Harmandeep Kaur at harmandeep@ippstar.org
