Thanks for the Webinar. I found it very interesting and though provoking.
Am I correct in thinking that it is the responsibility of the food packer to ensure safety and carry out migration of the whole pack? We manufacture printed cardboard sleeves/cartons as secondary packaging. The food packer places the food in a tray with a film seal and then our sleeve goes over this having no direct food contact. We use low migration inks and have good GMP to reduce the risk of migration and set off . We do not have an influence on the primary pack used with our product and believe this is the responsibility of the next person in the supply chain but that we have done all that we can within our process to reduce the risk,
Are there any sleeve manufacturers like us out there who do migration testing on printed cardboard???
I have worked in primary packaging (CPET, Poly prop, APET) and we did send our product for Migration testing on a regular basis. (PIRA & RAPRA in the UK but there may be others available) We had a schedule to cover all the various plastics and all the colours in a 5 year rotation (Unless anything changed ) based on worst case scenario e.g. if we had several red CPET ones we would send the most heavily pigmented one only to represent the "family". Again we always got assurance from our raw material suppliers that they had complied with all the relevant legislation with regard to allowed & banned substances for food packaging. The migration testing was expensive and there are several mediums (Oil, Acetic Acid etc) so you need to chose the one which is best for the food it is going to hold. In some cases more than one test will be needed if the pack is to be used for several food products with differing constituents.
Regards
Sharon