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What do you get when you combine a large company with vast resources, multiple processing plants, and top technical and engineering talent with one that is nimble, innovative and solutions driven? You get A $1 billion ����ý, Sabert is among the top five manufacturers of rigid food packaging in North America. But at its core, the global packaging powerhouse still operates a lot like it did when it was founded in 1983.

The plastics industry is replete with stories of companies launched in a garage. But the founder of Sabert, Albert Salama, lived in New York and didn’t have a garage, so he began selling disposable platters for catering out of his apartment.

In 1986, Salama opened a thermoforming plant across the Hudson River in Elizabeth, N.J. Three years later, it added sheet extrusion capacity and moved to a plant in Sayreville, N.J., and began distributing products in Europe. Today, this food packaging dynamo has its corporate headquarters across the street from its 500,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Sayreville, and operates other facilities in California, Kentucky, Indiana, Texas, Illinois and Virginia.

To serve global customers, it runs manufacturing facilities in Nivelles, Belgium; Kimbolton, England; Zhongshan, China and Lodz, Poland. All told, the company employs more than 2,000 around the world. The company is still privately held by Salama. The Sabert founder is still involved in the ����ý, though in early 2024 the company named Paul McCann as CEO, with Salama moving to executive chairman.

McCann joined Sabert with more than 25 years of experience in the packaging and processing industries. This includes stints at Graphic Packaging International, where he last served as senior vice president, leading its $1+ billion foodservice division. He also held senior management roles with Solo Cup Co., Smurfit-Stone Container Corp., and Monsanto Corp. in procurement, supply chain and operations, and general management.

Sabert’s growth has been the result of internal product development,
diversification and acquisitions. In 2016, Sabert bought Kalman Packaging Inc., a North Carolina-based manufacturer of thermoformed plastic hinged food containers, focused on the bakery/supermarket ����ýes. That same year, it bought Mullinix Packages Inc., based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, giving it inroads into the APET and barrier packaging industries Sabert has also been a step ahead of many in the industry in recycling and sustainability initiatives. In 2013, it established Inc., a polyolefin recycling operation in Monmouth Junction, N.J. that supplies Sabert with PP/PE blends sourced from post-consumer caps and labels, byproducts of the PET bottle recycling process.

From a 140,000-square-foot plant led by Yupsy Zaninovic, manager of engineering and new technologies, Nuvida has upcycled 34,580 metric tons of PCR waste since 2019. In 2024, it diverted 126 metric tons of plastic bottle labels from landfills with the commercialization of its Advantage 500 recycled label resin. Nuvida has expanded to the point where it supplies PCR not only to its sister company but also to other processors.

Sustainabilty Done Right

On the sustainability front, Sabert is directed by Richa Desai, chief sustainability and strategy officer. Desai joined Sabert in 2019 and
built its Earthtelligent sustainability framework. During her tenure, she spearheaded key initiatives, including the production of Sabert’s first annual Sustainability Report and the launch of the Zero Waste to Landfill program.

Sabert competes in an ever-increasing range of markets with thousands of SKUs. The product line includes platters, plates, bowls, tubs, containers, clamshells, and more for applications that include takeout, prepared foods, catering, vegetables, and hot and cold food.

Companywide, it runs products from PP, PET and CPET. It is a big user not only of PCR-supplied by Nuvida but PCR bottle flake and post-industrial thermoforming skeletal scrap that’s fed in a closed-loop system right back to extruders. Ron Seidel, the company’s senior director of plastics engineering and technology, says Sabert’s product line can accommodate a wide range of PCR levels.

Like most companies of its size and scope, Sabert has a catalog of stock products. But interestingly, considering it converts hundreds of millions of pounds of resin a year, some 90% of its product offerings are what Seidel characterizes as either “in collaboration with a customer (about half its ����ý) or for specific need.

“We think we’re different from other large companies,” Seidel elaborates. “At all our plants, we run 24⁄7. But we don’t have extrusion and thermoforming lines running the same product for days. We may run PP products on certain lines and PET on others, for example, but beyond that we don’t have dedicated lines. Our foundation was and still is built on new products and product development. Where there is an unmet need, even if the volume isn’t huge, we feel it is our mission to fill the gap.”

Sabert has a companywide process to do just that, called Blue Sky. The company allocates 20% of its designers’ time to brainstorm innovative solutions for food packaging, particularly focusing on sustainability and ideas others may deem unconventional. This process helps Sabert develop new products and improve existing ones to address sustainability challenges and customer needs.

“Sustainability is not an additional function to how we innovate,” says Desai, chief sustainability and strategy officer. “It’s an integrated part of the innovation process, right from Stage 1.”

Sabert dubs this methodology “Smart from the Start,” and Desai says it ensures sustainability is embedded at every stage of product development — without compromising functionality, durability or aesthetics.

About a year ago, Sabert launched the Earthtel r-PRO line of round bowls and containers. Made with a proprietary PP blend containing 25% PCR sourced from Nuvida, the new collection is 100% recyclable and meets the Association for Plastics Recycling’s guidelines for recyclability.

“This is the latest addition to our expansive portfolio of innovative sustainable packaging solutions that doesn’t sacrifice performance or aesthetics,” says Stephny Halstead, Sabert’s vice president of marketing and new product development.

“From using a new, proprietary recycled content PP blend to designing for full recyclability at end-of-life, the Earthtel r-PRO line exemplifies our commitment to minimizing environmental impact without comprising quality or functionality.”

Sabert, it’s worth noting, is also in the paper-packaging ����ý. It also
introduced compostable pulp packaging in 2009, starting with a manufacturing facility in China. In 2022, it opened a pulp manufacturing plant in Greenville, Texas.

Having a footprint in paper, pulp and plastics has opened new product design opportunities that combine the benefits of different materials. Last year, for example, it launched a second generation of its EcoSnap line of square and rectangular containers that feature a more robust, recyclable PE-coated corrugated paper base that’s teamed with a recyclable PET lid that retains its patented signature locking mechanism.

In its 2024 Sustainability Report, Sabert committed to a global strategic goal of having 80% of its sales coming from sustainable products by 2025. Its definition of “sustainable products” includes those composed of at least 25% recycled or bio-based content and that are either recyclable or compostable.

As Desai explains, this ambitious target was designed to have an immediate, positive impact on climate and circularity. “Achieving this goal requires deep collaboration with our customers to drive demand for these sustainable products, as well as strong partnerships with industries across the value chain to ensure a steady supply of recycled and bio-based feedstocks.” All told in 2024, Sabert launched 333 new products, 76% of which met the company’s sustainability criteria.

Sabert’s 2024 Sustainability Report also highlighted these
achievements:
• Maintained 71% share of sales from sustainable products
• Reduced energy intensity by 7% compared to 2019 baseline
• Decreased greenhouse gas emissions by 6% compared to 2020
• Reduced total water withdrawal by 10% compared to 2020
• Diverted 93% of manufacturing waste from landfills

At Sabert, a lot of new product development emanates from its Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Opened in 2000, the center is home to its engineering and tooling teams for production trials and qualifications. The company has capability to build thermoforming tools and components there. It also operates a small-format 30-inch line for development. The ATC in Fort Wayne is dedicated to new product and material development and tool validations, helping Sabert offer customers the opportunity to do small run trials with a shorter time to market and lower tooling costs.

Inside Sabert Sayreville

Plastics Technology visited Sabert at its Sayreville location, the second-largest of its north American processing plants (the Indiana facility is 800,000 square feet). In New Jersey, Sabert runs more than 10 single-screw, 6-inch extruders inline with thermoformers. Sabert has been running inline vs. roll-fed since 2000, notes Seidel, because it believes the former is more conducive to flexibility and real-time product format and sheet changes.

Sabert runs air-cooled extruders with a 30:1 L/D ratio. Widths range from 20-52 inches; thicknesses range from 15-80 mils. The company also has coextrusion and monolayer capabilities in all plants. Sabert blends PCR and virgin material off-line, then conveys that mixture to machine-mounted blenders that feed from two to four additional components.

Dryers are used, of course, for PET, which is hygroscopic; Sabert also uses pre-heater/dryers for PP and PCR, which serve to soften the material so
less energy is required of the extruder for melting.

“As a sustainability leader with a longstanding commitment to environmental stewardship, we recognize that sustainability is an evolving journey and consumers and our partners are progressing at different stages along the way,” notes Desai. “We’re on this journey, too, and while we’ve made significant progress, we continue to learn and adapt, using these insights to invest in infrastructure, research and development, and breakthrough initiatives to get better.”

What Nuvida Is All About

In 2012, the plant that Nuvida currently occupies in Monmouth Junction was a vacated can factory, giving Zaninovic and Charles Mackell, Sabert’s vice president of strategic sourcing, a chance to engineer it to specification.

For his role, Mackell purchases material for both Nuvida and Sabert, the latter of which puts him in regular contact with PET resin makers that often have their own bottle-reclaim operations. This connection, in turn, gave him an inroad to buy the polyolefin-based (primarily HDPE and PP) scrap, labels and caps, that bottle recyclers don’t want to begin with.

Nuvida does not have a wash line. But it built a proprietary
cleaning/rinsing process that it says thoroughly removes all contaminants, including stubborn chemical residues from polyolefin plastics. Its recycling process has passed the FDA’s challenging testing protocol to prove resins are safe for use in food contact with all types of foods. After the rinsing process, material is moved to holding bins before it’s conveyed to the extrusion operation.

While PP and HDPE are both polyolefins, they don’t always mix well together in an extruder, so Nuvida has technology to separate the two streams and, under Zaninovic’s direction, blend them in very specific ratios before processing them on its seven single- and twin-screw extruders devoted to its recycling operation.

Zaninovic spent nearly seven years at Sabert’s Sayreville sheet extrusion and thermoforming plant before moving to Nuvida, so he knows a bit about customizing equipment to the application. 

We don’t think of our machinery in terms of brands,” he says, “but more in terms of what fits our process. We tweak them from there.” Nuvida will utilize one of its twin-screw extruders, for example, when a particular blend needs to be devolatilized. Fluffy materials such as label stock, on the other hand, are fed to a machine specially designed to handle such feedstock.

Nuvida has a separate 89-mm twin-screw line devoted to compounding. During Plastics Technology’s visit, it was running a PP blend with 60% calcium carbonate filler at a rate of about 3,500 lbs/hr.

Nuvida pulls material from its lines hourly. It can make test specimens on its small injection molding machine or on a laboratory blown film line. Nuvida’s product line has 100% PCR foodgrade resin that holds an FDA No Objection Letter (NOL) for food contact and 100% certified PCR non-food grade pellets.