New Food explains: What viable PFAS-free food packaging really requires

A wrapper can keep grease off your fingers but make the food inside worse.

Take freshly cooked French fries. A dense barrier can stop oil passing through the pack, but if grease and moisture remain around the food, crisp fries can quickly soften. Improve one property and another can deteriorate.

That small packaging dilemma captures the essence of a much bigger challenge facing the food industry as it moves away from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

Since 12 August 2026, the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) prohibits the use of food-contact packaging containing concentrations of PFAS equal to or above specified limits. These include 25 parts per billion (ppb) for an individual PFAS measured through targeted analysis, 250ppb for the sum of targeted PFAS and 50 parts per million (ppm) for PFAS including polymeric forms.

Meeting those limits still leaves developers with a long list of questions. Will the replacement protect the food for long enough? Will it run on existing equipment? Can it withstand grease, moisture or oxygen without becoming unnecessarily complex? What happens to it after use?

Fluorine is almost too good to be replaced”

Jouni Lattu, Sales Director for Industrial Chemistry at VTT

VTT’s research and industry experience spans food safety, shelf life, barrier performance, processing, consumer experience, recyclability and cost, with the balance changing substantially from one application to another.

For food businesses, removing PFAS means defining a product’s genuine performance needs, identifying acceptable trade-offs and avoiding solutions that create new packaging problems elsewhere.

PFAS set an awkward benchmark

PFAS have been used for decades in food packaging to provide grease resistance, and they are difficult to displace because fluorine chemistry combines multiple desirable properties that food packaging developers often need in their product.

Hannes Orelma, Research Team Leader at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, explains that fluorine-based compounds have low surface energy, giving them effective resistance to both grease and water. Fibre-based materials naturally tend to absorb both.

A 2025 review of the transition towards PFAS-free fibre products similarly highlights the water- and grease-resistant properties that have made PFAS attractive and reports considerable variation in the performance and cost of emerging alternatives.

Jouni Lattu, Sales Director for Industrial Chemistry at VTT, sums up the difficulty rather neatly: fluorine is “almost too good to be replaced”.

Hot, fatty foods expose the problem with particular clarity.

A takeaway wrapper must control grease well enough to retain its integrity and keep oil away from the consumer’s hands. But the movement of grease and moisture also affects the food itself.

“The good thing about the PFAS compounds was that the packaging was keeping the food product crispy, which it was supposed to do,” Lattu explains. If the replacement becomes too dense, however, “it will make the grease stay on the surface and that makes the product itself soggy. So your French fries or crispy chicken become soggy.”

Strong grease resistance can be achieved with other materials. Orelma points to aluminium foil and dense films as examples, but they behave differently around the food to PFAS-treated paper. Thus, matching a headline property such as grease resistance does not necessarily reproduce the same package performance.

Requirements also change with the product. Flour and cereals may work with relatively simple fibre structures. Liquid products need barriers capable of containing the product and supporting heat sealing. Modified-atmosphere packaging (MAP) must retain protective gases or limit oxygen ingress, while fat-rich foods bring different demands around grease and moisture.

Developers use properties such as oxygen transmission rate (OTR) and water vapour transmission rate (WVTR), while grease resistance can be assessed through methods such as kit testing. In hot-food applications, Lattu says test kitchens and experimental trials are also needed to see what happens to the food inside the package.

That leads to one of the most useful questions in the PFAS debate: how much barrier does this food actually need?

The 2025 fibre-products review notes that PFAS can deliver performance beyond the functional requirements of some applications and recommends comparing alternatives against their intended use. VTT raises a parallel concern: compensating for lost performance can result in more packaging material being used than the product requires.

A September 2026 review of fluorine-free surface and barrier materials found no single fluorine-free material that universally reproduces PFAS performance, yet application-specific systems can achieve competitive water and oil resistance, barrier properties and mechanical integrity.

That makes product specification the necessary starting point for material selection. Developers must define the grease, moisture, oxygen or gas barrier genuinely required before potential PFAS-free systems can be meaningfully compared.

The review also identifies durability, scalability and lifecycle and toxicological assessment as continuing challenges. Removing fluorinated chemistry does not remove the need to assess the replacement itself.

When trade-offs become design choices

Rather than trying to reproduce every characteristic of the material being replaced, developers may gain more room by redesigning the package itself.

Lattu calls redesign the potential “low-hanging fruit”, pointing to greater ventilation as one possible approach.

A real-world example is already emerging at Five Guys. In the US and Canada, the chain says its PFAS-free natural-kraft fry bags are designed to increase airflow and wick excess oil away from the fries. Customers may see more oil on the bag, but the design is intended to reduce excess oil and steam around the fries.

The same underlying food-quality trade-off is relevant closer to home. Five Guys also tells UK customers that grease may appear on its paper bags and advises leaving them open to prevent fries becoming soggy. The company does not state that its UK packaging uses the same PFAS-free format, but the guidance illustrates why grease management, airflow and food texture need to be considered together.

The example makes Lattu’s point tangible. A cleaner-looking wrapper is only one measure of performance; visible grease can coexist with a design intended to protect the quality of the food inside.

Trade-offs can become commercial questions too.

Lattu uses the evolution of takeaway coffee as an analogy for how packaging economics can change alongside the product itself: “The coffee market changed, and at the same time, it could afford to pay for the more expensive packaging for coffee.”

The analogy does not establish that consumers will universally pay more for PFAS-free packaging. But it raises a useful commercial question: could a higher packaging cost be easier to absorb if accompanied by a higher-value, reformulated or otherwise differentiated food proposition?

Commercial viability is only one part of the equation. Any replacement must also be demonstrably compliant. There is currently no harmonised EU methodology for testing PFAS in food-contact packaging, although the European Commission’s June 2026 PPWR guidance sets out a recommended enforcement approach.

In practice, developers need to establish both functional performance and regulatory compliance.

A material can clear those hurdles and still leave a third question unresolved: whether the overall food-packaging system produces a better environmental outcome while accounting for the wider relationship between sustainability and food safety.

Judge the package and food together

The EU generated 79.7 million tonnes of packaging waste in 2023, equivalent to 177.8kg per person, according to the latest Eurostat packaging waste statistics. Paper and cardboard represented 40.4 percent of the total and plastic 19.8 percent.

Food waste adds another dimension. The EU generated 58.2 million tonnes of food waste in 2023, equivalent to around 130kg per person, with households accounting for 53 percent, according to Eurostat’s latest figures.

The figures describe different waste streams and cannot be directly equated. Their relevance is that changing the package can affect what happens to the food.

A 2024 review of food-packaging lifecycle assessments incorporating packaging-related food waste covered 23 peer-reviewed papers comprising 31 studies. Among the 21 studies that assessed shelf-life extension, the environmental benefits associated with avoided food waste outweighed the direct environmental impacts of the packaging solutions examined.

The evidence was concentrated particularly in meat, vegetables, fruit and dairy, so the finding does not establish the same balance for every food category.

The practical implication is that reducing the direct footprint of a package can still produce a poorer overall result if the change materially increases food loss. Additional packaging, meanwhile, cannot automatically be assumed to improve sustainability simply because it extends shelf life.

A 2026 systematic review also found substantial methodological differences between various food-packaging lifecycle assessments, reinforcing the need for application-specific comparisons.

VTT reaches a similar conclusion. Its written responses recommend considering food and packaging together, including how long the pack keeps the food edible and whether the consumer can empty it properly. With viscous foods such as yoghurt, product left clinging to the package can itself become part of the waste equation.

End of life adds another variable.

Orelma and Lattu explain that heavily grease- or food-contaminated takeaway paper generally does not enter conventional paper recycling. Cleaner retail packaging presents a different scenario, making recyclability more influential when materials and packaging systems are selected.

Collection and recycling practices vary, so theoretical recyclability tells only part of the story. The condition of the pack when discarded, the infrastructure available to deal with it and food-safety considerations associated with recycled and alternative food-contact materials also matter.

Making PFAS-free alternatives work at scale

VTT is also exploring whether smarter packaging could complement conventional barrier design. Through the EU-funded REDYSIGN project, researchers are developing fibre-based fresh-meat packaging alongside sensors capable of detecting food spoilage.

Orelma says such monitoring could provide information during distribution and later help indicate how long the customer can safely use the product. The concept remains under development, but it points to a wider possibility: packaging could eventually combine passive barrier performance with better information about food condition.

That distinction between promising technology and commercial packaging is crucial. A material can work in development long before industry can manufacture it consistently and economically at scale.

The packaging materials can change. So they don’t need to be always similar. So we can change to something totally different.”

Hannes Orelma, Research Team Leader at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

VTT identifies investment in pilot or first industrial production capacity as one challenge, while existing packaging machinery is typically configured around established materials.

For Lattu, the harder problem sits further upstream. He describes “creating the new chemistry” as the biggest hurdle and immediately raises the next question: “how to produce that in scale?”

He says suitable alternatives are not yet available at sufficient scale for some applications. Once the chemistry exists at the required volume, he argues, applying it to paper and converting the material into packaging becomes easier.

The September 2026 fluorine-free materials review similarly identifies scalability within existing manufacturing infrastructure as an outstanding challenge.

Lattu says the transition could involve “a little bit more cost, a little bit worse appearance [or] a little bit worse consumer convenience”.

Orelma puts the wider challenge more simply: “The packaging materials can change. So they don’t need to be always similar. So we can change to something totally different.”

PFAS-treated packaging has established a demanding performance benchmark. Moving away from it forces developers to decide which characteristics are genuinely essential and where change is acceptable.

For food businesses, the practical test is whether a replacement protects the food safely, performs at commercial scale and delivers an acceptable balance across performance, shelf life, consumer experience and end of life.