Edible Packaging for Food: Genius or Crazy? 

What's to come?
Oct. 9 2012 7:33 AM

Are You Going To Eat That Wrapper?

Edible packaging could cut down on food-related waste. But will people try it?

Cheese packs by WikiCells.
Cheese packs by WikiCells

Courtesy WikiCells.

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But even if you’re not willing to bring your own containers on food-shopping excursions—as patrons at a new packaging-free grocery store in Austin, Texas, are expected to do—there may be a new solution. Two startup companies want to wrap your food not in plastic that will linger in landfills but in materials that you can eat.

Taking a page from biomimicry—drawing inspiration from nature, as Velcro’s inventor did from burrs—Harvard professor David Edwards and designer François Azambourg have invented WikiCells, which encase various foods and liquids in edible membranes that function like the skin of a grape. WikiCells can hold gazpacho soup, hot chocolate, ice cream, yogurt—almost anything. The membrane itself is made of food particles—say, cheese or dried fruit—and held together by calcium or magnesium ions and alginate. Edwards has even made a grape-flavored pouch filled with wine.

While this solution may dispense with the wasteful primary packaging that actually touches the food, you still need a box or wrapper. So Edwards and his team also developed a number of secondary shells made of caramel, isomalt (rock candy), tapioca, or bagasse, which is what you have left if you take the sugar out of sugar cane. When the casing is made of caramel or isomalt, it’s edible, although that’s not practical for mass distribution for many products—who wants to eat the layer that everyone else in the grocery store fondled, anyway? The bagasse and tapioca versions aren’t edible, but they are compostable. Some companies already use bagasse to make things like food trays. Usually, it’s coated to make it oil- and water-resistant. But because WikiCells’ skin keeps water out (and in) that’s not necessary—you can simply compost the “shell” and wash the WikiCells inside as you would apples or peaches—making the total product more environmentally friendly.  So when you buy ice cream bars at the grocery store, each would be wrapped not in plastic but in a WikiCell membrane, flavored, for example, like chocolate chip cookie dough, and the bagasse “shell” or box would hold five or six. 

The Indiana company MonoSol is also exploring this space. Earlier this month, MonoSol officially announced its launch of Vivos edible, water-soluble film or polymer. The Vivos packets can hold hot chocolate powder or instant coffee or oatmeal or whey protein drinks. Just place the package in either hot or cold water, and the edible film dissolves. (Here’s a demo). Dissolving, edible packaging could be used in your home kitchen, at restaurants, or even in the military.


Bullion cubes with edible packaging.
MonoSol's bullion cubes

Courtesy MonoSol.


Edwards—who has also invented an inhalable chocolate called Le Whif, inhalable caffeine, and even an inhalable tuberculosis vaccine—also hopes to create WikiCell vending machines and is currently testing out a prototype machine that runs without electricity in a rural community outside of Johannesburg. He imagines a future where mini WikiCell machines sit on kitchen countertops, allowing consumers to design their own packaging, although why, exactly, we might want to do that is unclear, as is how that would actually work in practice.

Ever since the Chinese first coated apples with wax in the second century, entrepreneurs have experimented in edible packaging. Last month, two researchers in South Korea published a paper suggesting an edible packaging made from trout skin. A British company just received a grant to make a spray-on, edible, protective film that could reduce waste from meat packaging. Another collaboration recently produced some lovely if impractical tomato-based containers. (There have also been, meanwhile, some remarkable recent advances in smart packaging.) But the major reason edible packaging hasn’t yet taken off is that companies have struggled to make it cheap, hygienic, and, most important, tasty.

The danger, of course, is that WikiCells and Vivos film could end up just two more in a string of curious novelties, going the way of Crystal Pepsi, Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo, and Bic’s disposable pantyhose. But the supermarket chain Billa, at least, is probably paying attention. 


Jamie Holmes is a Future Tense fellow at the New America Foundation.