Nestlé scraps plastic packaging for Quality Street chocolates

Nestlé is ditching plastic wraps from the bulk of Quality Street chocolates – and upping Kit Kat’s sustainability credentials with new recycled plastic wrappers.

The fmcg giant is switching nine out of the 11 chocolates offered in a tin of Quality Street from the long-standing foil and cellulose sweet wrappers to new paper wraps.

Two chocolates – Orange Crunch and Green Triangle – will remain in foil wrappers as they never used cellulose in their packaging in the first place. 

The transition has already begun but would take several months to complete, said Nestlé, meaning shoppers would find a mix of both old and new wrappers in Quality Street cartons, pouches, tubs and tins over the months to come. The mix of sweets has not changed.

Nestlé claims the move will remove more than two billion pieces of packaging from the supply chain.

It has also unveiled new packs for Kit Kat made with 80% recycled plastic, which, though not suitable for household recycling in the UK, will be able to be recycled at some 5,000 supermarkets across the UK.

They will feature on-pack recycling labels advising consumers to take them back to stores, and provide information on Wrap’s Recycling Locator Tool, which they can use to guide them to their nearest recycling points.

The switch came after “a significant upgrade” to the supplier’s York factory, said Nestlé Confectionery business executive officer Richard Watson, adding Nestlé was “taking a leadership position on packaging sustainability”.

The business plans to reduce its use of virgin plastic by one-third and make all its packaging recyclable or reusable over the next three years. 

“The changes we are announcing today have been informed by detailed lifecycle assessments that have enabled us to identify solutions with a lower environmental impact than our current packaging.”

The move makes Quality Street the second Nestlé brand to move into paper packs, after Smarties moved its entire range into paper packs in 2021.

It comes as The Grocer revealed earlier this year that Quality Street tubs shrunk in size for the first time in three years this year, in a bid by Nestlé to mitigate surging costs. The tubs dropped from 650g to 600g.