Beyond the Punnet: Salty’s Linerless Box Replaces Plastic in Fresh Produce Transport Packaging
Rethinking plastic across the entire supply chain
Plastic reduction in fresh produce shouldn't stop at the supermarket shelf.
Behind every retail pack is a much larger transport and distribution system — and many fresh produce boxes still rely on single-use plastic polyliner bags to manage moisture and protect fruit during storage and transportation.
Salty's Linerless Box uses our specialist award winning bio-coated fibre technology to integrate this functionality into the fibre-based transport packaging itself, creating an alternative to the traditional box-and-plastic-liner system.
Our approach remains the same:
Don't just remove the plastic — understand the function it performs and redesign the packaging system around it.
Designed Around the Fruit
Fresh produce continues to respire throughout storage and transportation. Moisture loss, gas exchange, humidity and temperature all influence fruit quality and shelf life.
This is particularly important for export produce travelling through extended cool-chain environments.
Salty's bio-coated fibre technology allows barrier performance to be engineered around these requirements, helping manage moisture and gas transmission while maintaining the structural performance required from transport packaging.
Instead of adding a separate plastic liner inside the box, the functionality is incorporated into the fibre packaging.
Protect the fruit. Remove the polyliner. Recover the fibre.
One Material. One Packaging System.
Removing the plastic liner has the potential to simplify the packaging system as well as reduce plastic.
The Linerless Box combines the structural transport pack and functional barrier into a predominantly fibre-based solution, helping businesses reduce their reliance on single-use soft plastic across high-volume fresh produce supply chains.
Salty's bio-coated fibre technology is made with no added PFAS and has been developed with fibre recovery and repulpability in mind.
Supporting the PPWR Transition
Transport packaging is also part of the changing regulatory landscape.
The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) is increasing the focus on packaging minimisation, recyclability, plastic reduction and circular packaging systems across the supply chain.
For growers, exporters, packhouses and global produce businesses, this creates an opportunity to look beyond consumer packaging and identify where plastic can also be eliminated from secondary and transport packaging.
The Linerless Box provides a pathway to do exactly that.
Commercially Available Bio-Coated Fibre Technology
The technology behind the Linerless Box is commercially available now.
Salty can supply bio-coated fibre for fresh produce transport applications, with barrier properties developed around the requirements of the produce, storage environment and supply chain.
The opportunity is significant: replacing a plastic liner in one box may appear small, but across millions of export cartons, eliminating one piece of plastic from every box can create substantial material reduction.
The Linerless Box demonstrates the bigger potential of Salty's technology — using functional fibre to remove plastic not just from the retail shelf, but across the fresh produce supply chain. Our coated fibre technology and linerless box for climacteric fruit were introduced to Zespri in 2020 and trialled across their supply chain.
Turning off the plastic tap without turning off packaging performance.
Interested in removing plastic polyliners from your fresh produce transport packaging? Contact Salty to discuss bio-coated fibre materials and Linerless Box applications.