Recyclable Pouches | Back Country Cuisine

Pouches

NOW SOFT-PLASTIC RECYCLABLE IN NZ

We work hard to make Back Country Cuisine meals for you that taste great and weigh less than a third of their weight when you eat them.

Perfect for those long days out in the bush to provide the balanced nutrition needed when maintaining your energy is of paramount importance.

How to recycle your pouch in New Zealand:

  1. Be a tidy Kiwi and pack your used Back Country Cuisine pouches out of the bush.
  2. When you get home wash and dry your pouches as part of doing the dishes.
  3. Drop your clean and dry Back Country Cuisine pouches into the Love NZ Soft Plastics Recycling bins. Find your nearest bin here www.recycling.kiwi.nz/store-locator

The key to keeping food fresh and safe to eat is cooking, storage and managing moisture and oxygen levels. To keep our meals fresh and tasting great for four years required us to develop a very hard-working pouch made up of three layers flushed with nitrogen gas and sealed tightly.

Starting from the inside, the first layer of the pouch is a special plastic that is safe to use with boiling water and protects the meal and your spoon from the next layer of thin aluminium foil. Aluminium forms the heart of our pouch and provides a very high barrier to oxygen, moisture and light entering the pouch from the outside. Another benefit of Aluminium is that it can be fully recycled and reused an infinite number of times. The last layer is the colourful outside layer of plastic which protects the Aluminium foil from being punctured from the outside.


The future of Back Country Cuisine’s packaging involves expanding the recycling of the pouches we use today to Australia and switching to new packaging materials that have less environmental impact. We’re actively working to find and test materials that meet our needs. To date the materials we’ve shelf-life tested haven’t come close to the performance of our existing pouches, but we are continuing our search and testing.

Enjoy your Back Country Cuisine meal but please don’t leave pouches in the outdoors or burn them - aluminium won’t burn and burning plastic pollutes the environment. Wherever you are in the world, be a tidy Kiwi and take all your rubbish out with you.