Project description
Airless packaging that remains airless even after opening
When exposed to air, many products go bad due to oxidation or bacterial contamination. Therefore, many products are vacuum-packed, minimising the need for preservatives while extending shelf life. Conventional vacuum-packaging technology is expensive and requires specialised machinery. The Spanish SME Infinity Vacuum Safe Technology has developed an airless packaging solution comparable in performance to standard airless packaging but much less expensive and easier to use. Further, it prevents air entry after opening a package as well, as if it were never opened. The EU-funded IVS project is supporting the team’s efforts to optimise the technology and create a business plan to take it to market.
Objective
Airless packaging technology is the solution to a largely unsolved problem: preserving liquid food, cosmetic, pharma, and chemical products after the package has been opened. Airless packaging preserves the protective atmosphere of the package after opening and therefore, it preserves the integrity of the product from air oxidation and bacterial contamination. Ultimately, it extends product’s shelf life, reduces product waste, enables brands to use less or no chemical preservatives and create more natural products.
However, current airless packaging solutions are complex, expensive, and require sophisticated filling machinery, which highly limits its scope of application to a very narrow portion of mostly upscale cosmetic products. 86% of the airless packaging market is constrained to 11% of the packaging market. The largest segments of the packaging market, food, beverages, home care, which represent 89% of the market, only in rare cases benefit from the advantages of airless technologies.
IVS is a patented sealing system for flexible liquid packaging that enables to deliver the product without any air intake. IVS has all the valuable benefits of airless packaging but it has two further key benefits that may turn it into a breakthrough solution in the market: very low price per unit and low Total Cost of Adoption. IVS is intended to disrupt the airless packaging market by making the airless technology also viable for lower-price products in the largest segments of the packaging market: food, beverages, and home care.
We plan to launch IVS in the market and we seek to further develop it to a market-ready product. We will use Phase 2 for this purpose, with a total investment of €1 million in 18 months. The overall plan is to commercialize IVS first in Spain and speed scalability at international level through a network of allies and partners. Thanks to this strategy, we expect to reach a turnover of €30 million and 92 employees by year 2024.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
46191 VILLAMARXANT
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.