Our favourite Smarties just got smarter
Who doesn’t love smarties?! And who remembers those imitation versions that our parents tried to push on us back in the eighties?
No? Just me then…
Nestle has been a much-loved brand for as long as most of us can remember. I remember requesting a Smarties Easter Egg one year, only to receive one that looked like a Smarties egg. The chocolate was the immediate giveaway. (I politely ate the cheaper version, but swore that I would never be fooled again).
But we digress. Nestle has made lots of positive moves in recent times, towards engaging in more sustainable practices with its brands. So, it comes as no surprise that it has just committed to replacing 250 million plastic Smarties packs sold annually, with recyclable paper packaging. A quarter of a million packets make up 90% of the entire Smarties range, so this is a huge step. It will make them the “first global confectionery brand” to make such a switch for all its products worldwide, according to the firm.
The new designs, which will be in Ireland and the UK by April, include sharing bags, multipacks, and giant hexatubes made from coated paper, paper labels or carton board, produced from “sustainably sourced and recyclable material”. Nestlé began introducing Smarties sharing block packed in recyclable paper in the UK last year, so this is not new territory for this particular Nestle brand.
It comes amid Nestle’s wider pledge to make 100% of its packaging of all brands recyclable or reusable by 2025 and the firm has also committed to helping tackle climate change by planting hundreds of millions of trees within the next 10 years and increasing the number of “carbon neutral” brands. The transformation of the Smarties packaging is only one of the brands’ ‘SMART Initiatives’, which aim to support sustainability and enhance the overall product experience.
Alexander von Maillot, Nestle’s global head of confectionery, said: “Moving Smarties packaging to recyclable paper is one of our key sustainable packaging initiatives in the confectionery category.
“It is a further step in realising Nestle’s ambition to make all of our packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025 and to reduce our use of virgin plastics by one-third in the same period.”
