Consumers, parents and advocates of food waste reduction have long touted the value of plastic wraps to help protect food for longer. An estimated 80 billion pounds of food winds up in landfills annually, with 47% coming from residential waste, according to AT Kearney, the global management-consulting firm. Buying less and preserving more is part of the solution. Meanwhile, wraps, containers and bags help consumers preserve food for longer.
Yet the science behind go-to household items like plastic wraps is complicated, particularly when taking into account the chemicals required in making the products do their job. As SC Johnson Chairman and CEO Fisk Johnson recently wrote in the Harvard Business Review, Saran Wrap debuted as a food storage product in 1953 after the US military used the product during the Second World War as an insole in soldiers’ combat boots and weather protection for fighter planes. SC Johnson acquired Saran Wrap from Dow Chemical in 1998. Johnson writes that Saran Wrap’s success was due to its “impenetrable barrier to odor” and “superior microwavability” – both made possible by polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC), the key chemical ingredient that gives Saran Wrap its’ superior performance against competitors.
Around the same time as SC Johnson’s acquisition of Saran Wrap, the US Food and Drug Administration, environmental groups, and consumers worried about the effects of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) ubiquitously found in construction, electronics, consumer products and packaging. But, while toy, health care and fashion industries all used PVC, some studies had found that burning PVC releases toxic chemicals into the environment. In 2002, SC Johnson decided to phase out chlorine-based external packaging including PVC.
From a safety standpoint, the company could have simply eliminated PVCs from its product packaging, leaving Saran Wrap unchanged. Yet as wraps were scrutinized the difference between PVC and PVDC became blurred, Johnson says.
SC Johnson decided to eliminate PVDC from its Saran Wrap and to cease selling wraps containing chlorine, including PVDCs, by 2004. Changing a recognizable product in a portfolio might risk product sales, while a revised product might not perform as well, meaning disappointed consumers, stakeholders and a loss of trust in the company.
“But sometimes not making changes, even to a profitable go-to household item like Saran Wrap, is just as risky,” Johnson said.
Unilaterally removing a major chemical
The company gave a dedicated research and development team a year to recreate Saran Wrap without PVDCs. SC Johnson’s Greenlist process, launched in 2001, helped its product developers use criteria such as biodegradability and human toxicity to rank how ingredients impact human health and the environment, and to reformulate the ingredients that made up Saran Wrap. Under SC Johnson Greenlist process criteria, PVC rated 0, so, according to Johnson, the company pledged to eliminate the ingredient from its external packaging altogether.
SC Johnson had done something similar previously. Product developers removed and substituted active ingredients in pest-control products because of their SC Johnson Greenlist process score, while some competitors did not. Even before the SC Johnson Greenlist process, Johnson noted his family’s company first removed a major chemical in 1975 when research showed harmful links between chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in aerosols and the planet’s ozone layer. Johnson’s father, Sam Johnson, was then CEO and banned CFCs from all the company’s aerosol products worldwide years before they were banned by government.
The pitfalls of recreating products
Johnson writes the research and development team working on a new version of the Saran Wrap was initially optimistic a PVDC-free product would perform just like the original. Yet to provide the odor barrier and microwavability of the original required a multilayer, thicker film and expensive new industrial machinery. A packaging company in Europe had created a chlorine-free polyethylene wrap, yet testing showed the new product was less sticky and less effective at preserving food. The team simply could not re-create the original characteristics of the first Saran Wrap.
Ultimately, SC Johnson replaced the original Saran Wrap with the newly reformulated polyethylene product, Johnson writes. This move yielded a useful product, but lacked competitive advantages. Predictably, Saran Wrap’s market share dropped to 11% in 2014, vs 18% in 2004.
Even so, Johnson doesn’t regret the decision to recreate Saran Wrap. “Despite the cost, it was the right thing to do, and as someone with experience in chemistry and physics, I sleep better at night because of it.”
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