WPO creates Save Food category in WorldStar Student Award program

The WorldStar Student Award program is an international packaging design competition for students – undergraduate or graduate – from countries around the world who are involved in projects in the field of packaging – structural design and/or graphic design. To participate in the competition, the packaging project must have won a local award. Further, the packaging project should offer a new solution, irrespective of product, that is innovative, aesthetically appealing, environmentally compliant, easy to manufacture, convenient and relevant, and/or that brings efficiency to the packaging system. Entries for the new award can entirely new and do not need to have run for and won a national award previously, although only entries that could reduce food waste will be considered, as the Save Food Student Packaging Award has been created by WPO as part of its support for the Save Food Initiative. ‘The idea is to encourage students to develop new solutions on packaging preventing food waste,’ said WPO president Thomas Schneider.

Judging will be based on the degree of Innovation, sales appeal/graphics in the target country, sustainability aspects relative to the target country, ease of processing/manufacturing, the extent to which a pack is fit for purpose and complies with the functions of packaging, efficiency to the packaging system and overall impression. A 15 USD fee applies for each entry.

The top three highest scoring entries will be named as WorldStar Student Save Food Packaging Award winners and will receive a WorldStar Student Save Food Packaging Award winner certificate.

WPO sustainability vice president Johannes Bergmair said: ‘Save Food is a topic related to the whole supply chain. And there are many ways and technologies to work on this like logistics, farm to fork transcontinental routings, transit refrigeration, storage conditions, shelf life extension, product handling, and more. Packaging is just one of them and it is the key element that WPO will focus on.’

Entries for the next WorldStar Student Award program, and the new category, close on November 6. The award ceremony will take place alongside the first WPO meeting of 2016, in Budapest, Hungary in May.