Laser perforation and breathable packaging films

Fresh produce packaging films need to do more than simply protect what's inside.

Fruit and vegetables carry on respiring after they’re packed, and the pack itself needs to manage that process; chiefly, by controlling airflow and moisture so produce stays at its best for as long as possible.  

Laser perforation gives packaging designers a precise way to do this. By creating micro-perforations that are engineered to match how a specific product breathes, it provides greater control and certainty of performance than a generic hole pattern.  

Terinex Flexibles is backing this type of breathable flexible packaging with substantial investment. Earlier this year, we acquired £336,000 of PerfoTec laser perforation and testing technology for our Derby facility. It’s a significant outlay for a single piece of equipment, and a clear signal of confidence in the technology’s ability to deliver quality breathable packaging films for fresh produce customers. 

Matching perforation to the produce

The rate at which fresh produce respires can vary enormously from one product to the next. A punnet of soft berries behaves nothing like a bag of root vegetables, and packaging therefore needs to account for this mismatch. Likewise, produce that looks similar on the outside can behave just as differently. Two varieties of soft fruit, for example, can have markedly different respiration rates, with each needing its own approach to perforation.  

Get it wrong, and the problems can be severe. These include trapped moisture, accelerated spoilage, or produce starved of the airflow it needs – any of these can shorten shelf life before the product even reaches the shopper. Retailers working to tight sell-by windows feel this directly, as lost shelf life often means increased waste and reduced margin on stock that never gets sold. 

The market needs smarter solutions as it grows. The UK fresh food packaging sector is forecast to reach around £2.9 billion by 2028, and flexible formats are taking an increasing share of that growth.  

For fresh produce specifically, the packaging film plays an active part in keeping the product fresh, and this puts pressure on suppliers to engineer films with real precision.  

How PerfoTec works

PerfoTec is a system that creates micro perforated packaging films. It pairs a respiration-measuring instrument with laser-guided perforation, so every pattern used on a fresh produce pack is built from real data on how that specific product behaves. 

The system works in a few clear stages, from measuring how a product behaves through to testing the finished perforation pattern. 

It starts with a fast respiration meter, which measures how quickly a specific product takes in oxygen and releases carbon dioxide and moisture. That data feeds into a data-driven design process, which calculates the ideal balance of gases inside the pack for that product. This is the basis of Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP), where the air inside the pack is deliberately different from the air outside it, in order to slow respiration and reduce moisture loss. 

The laser then creates micro-perforations to hit that target. Hole diameter can be set down to fractions of a millimetre, and perforation density can vary across a single pack – this allows suppliers to fine-tune the laser perforated films’ oxygen and moisture vapour transmission rates to suit the produce inside. Even small adjustments at this stage can have a measurable effect on how long produce stays fresh. 

Before a pattern goes into production, it’s tested against the data it was designed around. Trial packs are monitored over time to confirm the internal atmosphere behaves as calculated, and the pattern can be adjusted if results show it needs fine-tuning. 

The outcome is a packaging film that, far more than simply protecting produce, has become a key part of the product’s shelf-life strategy. 

Consistency and quality control

A perforation pattern is only useful if it can be reproduced accurately, pack after pack, across a full production run. Indeed, a film specified correctly but produced inconsistently won’t deliver the results a customer expects, however sound the underlying science behind it is. 

Terinex Flexibles’ fifth slitting unit, a new Ashe slitting machine, plays a central role here, with cameras fitted on every lane to check perforation consistency as film runs through production. 

This lane-by-lane monitoring catches variation before it reaches a customer’s production line. A hole that is fractionally too large, or a perforation that is spaced slightly off pattern, can throw off the carefully calculated gas balance a pack was designed around. Catching these issues early protects the shelf-life performance the whole process is built to deliver, across every run and well beyond the trial packs used during testing. 

Terinex Flexibles’ investment in PerfoTec, alongside this quality control infrastructure, reflects a wider commitment to getting fresh produce packaging right at every stage, from measuring how a specific product breathes through to the finished, tested film reaching a customer’s production line.  

If you are a grower, packer or food manufacturer working with produce that needs precise atmospheric control, get in touch with the Terinex Flexibles team to discuss perforated flexible packaging for a specific product line.  

 

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