The aluminium tube: Do you want a taste?
Imagine you have a new product. It tastes delicious, it looks good and its consistency is perfect in handling. Your primary impulse is to protect this premium product whilst bringing it to the consumer. Imagine you would find a packaging material where nothing else than the product itself gets inside: neither oxygen nor light can degrade the tasty appeal, and there is no deterioration in quality resulting from moisture, drying or foreign odours caused by bacterial contamination. And imagine that this packaging just happens to provide an additional special feature for your customers: perfect handling by reapplication of any semi-liquid or paste-type content in any metered amount. Sounds as if you have already made your decision! The aluminium tube will fulfil these criteria without restriction.
Aluminium is the optimum material for convenience packaging! The food industry has understood this fact for years and is one of the largest customers of aluminium tube producers in Europe. No surprise! The arguments for the benefits to food producers are manifold: perfect preservation, tastelessness and uncompromising hygiene. First item on the list of benefits is the unique product protection of aluminium which ideally meets the requirements of the food industry. Thanks to aluminium’s excellent barrier properties the product is efficiently protected so that food waste and loss are prevented. This is fully in line with the aims of the internationally well-known “Save Food” initiative which is supported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Hygiene and inertness are two further outstanding arguments for the use of aluminium. Aluminium tubes are produced under high hygienic conditions, also thanks to heat treatment at high temperature. Moreover, aluminium does not contaminate the taste of the product and tailor-made internal lacquers are chemically resistant to the package content. So filling products in aluminium tubes is already a quality feature in addition to the product brand itself.
But nowadays a packaging must provide more than optimal packaging performance. It has to be convenient in terms of additional benefit for the consumer, it has to enhance a brand image and communicate shelf appeal. In other words, the packaging must proclaim, “Choose me because I am the best!” In terms of decorative properties aluminium is second to none. Aluminium’s natural metallic sheen is often imitated but never attained and high-quality designs guarantee eye-catching shelf appeal. Even in terms of convenient dispensing and complete emptying, the aluminium tube trumps other packaging materials. Perfect dispensing is guaranteed because there is no vacuum pull and complete emptying is provided for the extreme flexibility of aluminium.
And finally, the use of aluminium stands for environmental protection as well. The use of aluminium means that the content stays fresh longer, which contributes to conserving the resources and energy used for the production of the filling. Entire and sustainable is the protection for products once filled in this lightweight metal, which achieves high recycling rates in Europe.
Besides the outstanding technical and design features, producers of cosmetic products appreciate aluminium as a valuable and ecologically sustainable packaging material which shows the highest recycling rates in Europe.
