The Glenroy Blog

What Is a Co-Packer? How Contract Packaging Works for Growing Brands The Short Answer: A co-packer (short for contract packager) is a third-party company that packages your product for you, either from scratch or after you've made it yourself. They own the equipment, the labor, and often the production facility, so you don't have to build all of that in-house. For growing brands, co-packing is often the difference between being stuck in a commercial kitchen and scaling to national retail....

Vertical Form Fill Seal (VFFS) Packaging Explained: How It Works, Best Uses, and How to Choose the Right Film The Short Answer: A vertical form fill seal machine takes a flat roll of flexible film, forms it into a bag around a forming tube, fills it with product, and seals it in one continuous vertical operation. It's one of the most widely used packaging formats in the food industry, and the film you choose determines whether your line runs smoothly or you spend the day fighting jams. VFFS...

Food Packaging and Shelf Life: How to Extend the Shelf Life of Your Products The Short Answer: Food packaging extends shelf life by blocking the oxygen, moisture, and microbial growth that cause spoilage. Choosing the right barrier properties and packaging technology for your specific food product is critical to preserving your product and ensuring a consistent customer experience. Food waste is a massive, measurable problem. The USDA estimates that roughly 30 to 40 percent of the U.S. food...

The Short Answer: What is Mono-Material Packaging? Mono-material packaging is a flexible package built from a single polymer family, so it moves through the recycling process as one clean stream. It replaces traditional laminates that mix different materials (like polyesters plus aluminum foil), which usually get rejected from curbside recycling. Brands moving toward the circular economy have a problem. Most flexible packaging today is made from two or three layers of different plastics bonded...

The Short Answer: Is Plastic Packaging Recyclable? Not all plastic is recyclable, and the type of plastic, its structure, and the available recycling infrastructure all determine whether your packaging can actually be recovered. A recycling symbol on a plastic item does not guarantee that the item will be accepted in every recycling stream. That gap between "technically recyclable" and "actually gets recycled" is where most brands get tripped up. The U.S. plastic recycling rate for packaging...