Nestlé Confectionery announced packaging innovations for two of its brands – Quality Street and KitKat. Quality Street will move to recyclable paper packaging for its twist-wrapped sweets. By replacing the double layer of foil and cellulose with a paper wrap, it will remove more than two billion pieces of packaging material from the brand’s supply chain.

In addition, KitKat will introduce wrappers made with 80% recycled plastic. These wrappers can be recycled at more than 5,000 supermarkets across the UK – and placed in household recycling in the Republic of Ireland. The rollout began in October on the brand’s flagship two-finger products, before being extended across the entire range by 2024.

Nine of the 11 Quality Street sweets will move to paper-based packaging. The Orange Crunch and the Green Triangle will remain in their simple foil wrappers as, traditionally, they have not had cellulose wrappers. The transition to paper, which is now underway, will take several months to complete. This means that for Christmas 2022, consumers will find a mix of both the old and new wrappers in their Quality Street cartons, pouches, tubs, and tins. The delicious mix of sweets inside is unchanged.

Richard Watson, Business Executive Officer, Nestlé Confectionery said: “These major packaging innovations have been pioneered by our teams here in the UK. The new KitKat packaging is enabled by a significant upgrade to Nestlé’s York Factory, while the category-leading Quality Street paper twist-wraps have been designed at our Confectionery Product Technology Center in York, and implemented in Halifax, the home of Quality Street for 87 years.”

The new KitKat packs will feature the Recycle At Store On-Pack Recycling Label (OPRL) – a UK labeling scheme established by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) to help consumers correctly reuse and recycle more material. The wrappers will also provide information about the Recycling Locator Tool – a platform launched by the national WRAP recycling campaign Recycle Now, which guides consumers to their nearest recycling point. Supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Co-op, Aldi, and Waitrose now offer soft plastic recycling facilities in stores, while most consumers in the Republic of Ireland can put soft plastics into household recycling.   

Quality Street is the second Nestlé confectionery brand to introduce paper, following Smarties, which rolled out recyclable paper packaging for all its confectionery products globally in 2021.  

Photo: Nestle Confectionery