Issue 3 of IN Food is live now, bringing together a May/June edition shaped by the practical pressures facing food processors, packaging suppliers, and the wider manufacturing base.
Rather than treating resilience as a boardroom phrase, the issue follows it into the places where it is tested: packaging lines, cold chains, energy systems, supplier networks, and production teams already working against cost and capacity constraints. Labour pressure opens the edition, with the sector facing a quieter but more awkward phase of the skills challenge. Fewer vacancies may look better on a spreadsheet, but the work still has to be absorbed by engineering, quality, operations, and line teams.
Packaging carries much of the same operational strain. Go-Pak looks at circularity in food service, where EPR, recyclability, and closed-loop recovery are turning packaging decisions into logistics and compliance questions. Edale follows the production side of the same shift, where sustainable substrates, shorter runs, coatings, and press stability determine whether recyclability targets can survive contact with the factory floor.
Food safety and traceability form another strong thread. Domino Printing Sciences examines the role of 2D codes in connected packaging, linking individual products and batches to richer data that can support upstream checks, recall precision, retailer controls, and consumer information. In seafood, the issue moves beyond provenance records to the condition of the product in transit, where time-temperature evidence can help close the gap between custody and care.
Processing features from LRQA, Hapman, and Secaro widen the discussion into assurance, equipment selection, and clean heat. Each subject sits in a different part of the food system, but the direction is consistent: more visibility, tighter control, lower waste, and less tolerance for systems that only work when conditions are easy.
Food manufacturing is dealing with the same pressures affecting factories elsewhere — energy volatility, digitalisation, automation, skills, regulation, and supply risk — only with shorter shelf lives and fewer opportunities to pause.
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