A salad film, a cheese wrapper, a kefir bottle. Three everyday products that are almost impossible to recycle today, and three reasons EROSKI took a seat at the table when the future of food packaging was discussed in Bilbao.
On 28 May 2026, EROSKI joined the roundtable “Sustainable Packaging in Action: Regulatory Compliance, Innovation, and Collaboration”, organised by ONTZI, the Basque Food Packaging Innovation Hub, during the Food 4 Future World Summit at the Bilbao Exhibition Centre. The session brought together the food industry, retailers, material manufacturers, and technology centres to compare real experience on three fronts: meeting tightening packaging regulation, the practical obstacles to moving sustainable materials onto production lines, and the innovations starting to close that gap. Ainara presented UPCYCLE and set out the project’s technical objectives for the audience.
For UPCYCLE, having EROSKI in that conversation matters. EROSKI is the project’s retail end-user, and it carries three of its four packaging use-cases: flexible films for salads, short-lifetime deli packaging for cheese, and bottles for kefir. Each relies today on plastics that are hard or impossible to recycle, from multi-layer cheese laminates to polyethylene films. Inside the project, EROSKI defines the shelf-life and barrier requirements these materials must meet, then tests UPCYCLE’s bio-based, recyclable alternatives through thermosealing trials and consumer panels in its own stores. That is precisely the perspective the Bilbao roundtable set out to capture, not a forecast that sustainable packaging is coming, but a retailer explaining what it takes to put it on the shelf.
Regulation will keep raising the bar for food packaging. Rooms like this one are where the companies that have to meet it start building the answers together.