Why food world is taking packaging seriously | Economic Times

Watching a Tibb’s Frankie being made is a multisensory experience. First the clanging of the metal spatula on the tawa as the roti is grilled. Then the sharp aroma of raw onions and masala sprinkled on before the filling is spooned over, rolled up and grilled again. You feel the heat through the packaging when it is handed over, which raises a dilemma: wait till it cools, or bite now to taste the hot spicy juices even at the risk of burning your mouth?In Beirut in 1967, Amarjit Singh Tibb tasted Lebanese wraps made from pita bread and varied stuffings. He devised a recipe and launched it to rapid success. Wraps were hardly new in India, with places like Nizam’s in Kolkata famous for their rolls. But Tibb’s real innovation was the packaging — a sleeve made of plastic or thick paper, sealed at one end. That allowed a much more liquid filling to be used, creating a very different taste experience from drier wraps. (It also resulted in the undignified, but irresistible impulse to slurp up the juices pooled in the wrapper.)79223060Dosa khakras aren’t as well known as Frankies, though they should be. They may have been invented in Surat, a city that loves snack innovations. Thin, dried khakras are a favourite, with many different flavours. And when dosas became popular, someone decided to come up with a dry crisp snack that tastes like a dosa. But it is very fragile, which is why the key innovation was not the dosa khakra itself, but the rigid plastic box it was packed in. This kept the dosa khakras unbroken and made them commercially viable.79223070Packaging often seems like an afterthought to food, just a way to preserve or deliver it. But as these examples show, packaging can also be part of the cooking process, since the final result would not exist without it. This is most obvious with canned products, like condensed milk, but even ready-to-eat foods like Frankies are affected by how and why they are packaged. Some cultures have always appreciated this. Japan is famous for its traditional food packaging, as beautifully presented in Hideyuki Oka’s book How to Wrap Five Eggs. The range of techniques and innovations have clearly carried over into Japan’s modern food packaging, which often combines functionality with stylish design. Some traditional Indian packaging resembles this, like the earthen pots used for nolen gur, Bengal’s delicious date palm syrup. The slightly porous pots absorb water from the syrup, helping thicken and preserve it better. The plastic tubes of nolen gur now available feel distinctly inferior.79223075Covid-19 has increased the importance of food packaging. The increasing importance of home delivery has sent demand for suitable food packaging soaring. Restaurants need to package food in ways that are hygienic and can even be sanitised by customers. It also needs to stay sealed during delivery and retain a sense of how the food would have tasted in the restaurant. And environmental concerns require the packaging to be as bio-degradeable or recyclable as possible. Some restaurants are trying, by sourcing packaging made from areca fibre or bagasse, or at least cardboard and sending instructions on how the contents should be assembled. Others are investing in stainless steel containers that customers are trusted to return with their next order. But many simply use standard plastic and foil boxes, which might be recyclable, but quickly leave customers with a mountain of old containers. And customers just have to eat, or reheat, as they get it.Yet, some purely Indian solutions are available, as the story of VENTiT shows. In 2006, Vinay Mehta, a Mumbai-based businessman with a corrugated cardboard business had a brainwave while on a drive between Mumbai and Pune. He had suffered, as we all have, from pizzas that had turned soggy in the delivery box from the steam they generate. Most boxes have holes on the side for the steam to escape, but this doesn’t really work since it is generated from the top and bottom of the pizzas.79223065Scott Wiener is a pizza box collector who has written a book, Viva La Pizza! The Art of the Pizza Box, which details different solutions to this problem, like aluminium liners and elaborate venting systems. But he says that Mehta’s solution is the best, since it simply uses the existing structure of the cardboard used for the boxes. This typically has three layers — two smooth outer layers that sandwich an inner layer that is ridged for extra strength. Mehta realised that these ridges could be natural vents. He cut holes in the outer layers, but not the inner one, so heat was retained but the steam could dissipate through the ridges. It required no extra material that might add cost or compromise cardboard’s environmental advantages. “The cost difference between VENTiT and a regular pizza box should not be more than Rs 2-3,” he says.In an article in Wired magazine in 2014, Wiener declared this the smartest pizza box in the world. Mehta took the time and expense to get patents and has got a fair amount of business from abroad. “One of my first orders, from Dubai, was for packaging parathas. I was very happy it was being used for Indian food,” he says. But he admits that it could have done better. “I think people found it hard to accept that this kind of innovation could come from India.”VENTiT boxes are used by a few customers in India, but the problem here, Mehta feels, is that the market is not professional enough. Most pizzerias get boxes from cut-rate suppliers, and haven’t even heard of the VENTiT option. But Covid might make a difference. As it happens, Mehta is recovering from it himself and says the experience was bad, but agrees that the pandemic represents an opportunity. We simply need to acknowledge how much good packaging, especially elegantly simple innovations like those devised by Tibbs and Mehta, can add to our experience of Indian food.