LiquiGlide offers zero-waste packaging innovation

21 Sep 2021 --- US packaging technology company, LiquiGlide, has launched its waste-reduction offering as it moves into the beauty and personal care (BPC) space. The company, which has created a proprietary liquid coating technology applied to the inside of packaging, announced in June that it was teaming up with US multinational consumer goods giant Colgate-Palmolive.

“Our mission is to revolutionize products and packaging by eliminating the friction between liquids and solids,” Damien Dossin, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) for LiquiGlide highlights. “Thanks to our partnership and recent launch with Colgate we have achieved this in toothpaste, taking a product that has been sold in tubes since the 1800s and putting it in clear, recyclable packaging that only works with our technology.” 

Colgate-Palmolive released its new Elixir line of three toothpaste formulas in PET-based packaging using LiquiGlide’s coating technology. The coating application removes the friction between the content of the internal product and the packaging, enabling the toothpaste to exit the tube container easily, thereby reducing wastage from toothpaste sticking to the tube.

“We have seen that consumers love being able to see how much is left and get all of the product out,” says Dossin. “By eliminating product getting stuck in the package, we have made the package more easily recyclable and eliminated material waste.”

LiquiGlide is now expanding into the beauty space, where it saw an opportunity to create a turn-key solution that would make it easy for brands to adopt its technology.

Use everything, waste nothing

Explaining how the liquid coating innovation works, Dossin says: “It prevents the product from sticking to the walls which means that consumers get all the product out. This has significant implications for sustainability. Regrettably, when there is product left in a package, that package often winds up in a landfill even if the bottle could be otherwise recycled.”

Using LiquiGlide’s technology enables all of that product to flow out of the container, allowing the package to be fully recyclable. EveryDrop packaging is designed for lotions, creams, gels, conditioners and similar beauty products. “While we do not make our own products, we serve as strategic partners with industry-leading businesses to help them implement the technology,” Dossin notes.

Click to EnlargeThe EveryDrop system can work with all manner of liquid products. Source: LiquiGlide.LiquiGlide began conceptualizing its EveryDrop range by working with Yves Behar’s firm, fuseproject, to survey packaging across industries and pinpoint specific CPG products and markets where it believed it could significantly improve user experience. “Once we settled in on lotions, creams, gels, and conditioners, we immersed ourselves in the design language of the beauty space and started with whiteboarding concepts that would resonate with brands and consumers,” Dossin explains. 

The company then reduced those concepts to products that it was able to market test. “We transformed those concepts to designs and prototypes for market testing, which taught us a lot, allowing us to refine our designs based on feedback from real consumers,” emphasizes Dossin.

During this process, Dossin details its biggest challenge as: “Finding designs that can deliver the functionality that is critical for user experience, while maintaining an aesthetic that resonates with brands and consumers with a wide array of tastes and demands. Market testing with real consumers was ultimately critical for us to gain confidence that our packaging was delivering on basic unmet needs.” 

“The desire to get all of the product out of the package is probably the most basic, unmet need across the CPG industry,” says Dossin. “CPG brands employ a range of tools to mask or minimize the issue - overfilling, opaque packaging, different types of pump mechanisms, runnier products - but the problem has remained unsolved, until now.” 

Having discovered and rolled out its coating technology, the company is now showcasing its fully recyclable, mono-material packaging innovation that allows consumers to get every last drop of product.

By Natasha Spencer-Jolliffe, BPC Insights Senior Journalist