Prof Melvin Pascall: Better packaging could bring Trinidad and Tobago more forex

Trinidad and Tobago-born, US-based professor of food science and technology Melvin Pascall believes improved food packaging could help Trinidad and Tobago earn more foreign exchange.

Pascall said if a product was a lower quality in terms of taste and colour and was also advertised in a package that did not look as good, then its chances of capturing the market were lower.

Pascall teaches at Ohio State University, and his research interests are food packaging, antimicrobial packaging, food-contact surface sanitisation, food safety and food regulations. He is an expert in food packaging with an emphasis on integrity, modified atmospheric packaging, nanotechnology and plastics, edible packaging, packaging material sanitisation and food safety.

Pascall has received several awards and has written two books and 72 journal articles.

In 2020, he was selected as a Fellow of the US Institute of Food Technologists. In 2022, he and Dr Rafael Jimenez-Flores were the recipients of that year’s Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Achievement Award.

He has also worked as a research scientist at the US Food and Drug Administration in Chicago.

Pascall spoke to Newsday before giving a lecture at the Mayaro/Rio Claro Regional Corporation about his work on December 19.

He made a promise to help any Caribbean nation requiring help and has worked with Jamaica and Guyana and is currently working with the UWI St Augustine campus.

His journey into food and packaging began in Rio Claro, where he was born and raised. He attended Rio Claro ASJA Primary School, then Rio Claro Government Secondary School and the Sixth Form Government Secondary School, St James.

In 1973, he began work at Carib Glassworks Ltd, Champs Fleurs, where he spent 15 years as a lab technician.

An e-mailed biography said he did a two-year course at the John Donaldson Technical Institute (University of TT) and earned a BSc in agricultural science, a masters in packaging science and a PhD in food science and environmental toxicology.

If Pascall had to do it all over again, he’d do the same thing, as he believes, “No matter what the situation is, whether it is war, famine, a question of plenty or drought, we all have to eat because we need to survive.”

At Ohio State he runs a lab, which examines the latest, growing questions and problems of food packaging.

But his deep delve into packaging began at Carib Glassworks. He was a shift worker and would look at the dimensions of the glass to ensure they conformed to the standards.

“I then went up to the chemical lab, where we looked at the testing of glass – chemical, microscopic analyses.”

The package was usually the most expensive part of most products, but a lot of people did not think of the cost of packaging, he added.

“There is a whole lot of psychology when it comes to packaging that the consumer was not thinking about,” Pascall said.

Label colours, shape and size were all carefully designed to attract the consumer, he said.

“You are not purchasing the product for the package, you are purchasing it for the product – but what draws you to the product is the package.”

He believes the billion-dollar packaging industry has been so successful that part of the world’s environmental problem is a consequence, “because it is so convenient. It has become such an integral part of our lives, the use of packaging.

“Let us face it, there are some advantages to packaging: convenience, the ability to try new products, preserving the product, preserving the shelf life of the product, preservation from contamination, preservation from quality loss like flavour loss, colour loss or quantity loss. You can’t deny packaging has contributed to our lives as we know it today.

"But it has been so successful that we were not thinking, ‘What is the impact of the trash that we throw out?’”

He said trash has accumulated and got to the point where humanity was asking what it had done.

That was why part of his work now focused on sustainable, souvenir and edible packaging, among other things.

Packaging must be able to withstand transportation, packages banging against each other, have mechanical strength to contain the product as well as the product must not dissolve in the package, Pascall said.

In order to do that, it must be strong enough to survive all the various stresses it has to undergo before it gets to the consumer who opens the package and consumes the product, he added.

“The process of making the package so resistant means it will be resistant to the environment. So now we are backing up and saying, 'Wait a minute, here we have an environmental problem we have to address.'”

He said once a package served its function, it should be recycled, reused or returned so that it does not wind up in a landfill, trash or oceans.

Pascall is working on bio-based packaging, made from materials that easily disintegrate. That included edible packaging and, while it did not mean all those packages could be eaten, it meant they could easily break down in the environment and could be consumed by microorganisms or easily dissolve in water.

“It could break down in the presence of sunlight, and also certain bacteria could actually feed on the plastic as a source of food,” he said.

His lab is also looking at the recycling process and plastics that were more resistant to degradation.

“We could recycle them, grind them up and reuse them to make new containers. Some would do that better than others, like glass or metals.

“It is easy to recycle them and not get contamination in the recycled product."

However, packaging engineers face a major challenge: “How do we educate the public about the significance/importance of environmental management from a consumer standpoint?”

Pascall said people must be willing to make a sacrifice for the environment, even if it means some inconvenience, because separating trash or packaging means separating it into up to three or four bins – for instance, one bin for regular trash and one for plastics.

He said governments also had to be willing to enact laws that might be unpopular but that were essential for the good of the environment.

“If the public is educated enough, it would say, ‘Yes, I don’t mind spending 50 cents more on an environmentally friendly package.’”

North America, Europe and Japan are the leading countries in packaging and sustainable packaging.

“They have very strict rules, laws that dictate how the package is supposed to relate to the environment, and that was what initiated my working with Jamaica.

“I recall when they invited me it was a combination of the ministries of tourism, commerce, agriculture and civil aviation. The EU countries were requiring dangerous goods like rum to meet certain standards of packaging."

Rum is flammable and could cause fires in enclosed spaces such as planes.

Pascall collaborated with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (FAO) and worked on programmes in support of the agency’s mission to feed the world. That work resulted in the 2021 book Good Packaging Practices for Micro, Small and Medium-sized Food Processing Enterprises in the Caribbean Community and Common Market.

“Look at the book and see all the things I describe in the book. How we can improve the quality of the packaging and how that can make our products more competitive on the international market, especially if we are looking to get foreign exchange by exporting our products?

“All of these things I talk about, like souvenir packaging.”

Pascall said many Caribbean countries relied on tourism for foreign exchange and could therefore make souvenir packaging a greater part of their offering.

“You can use that as a tool to make money, because you can package the product in such a way that tourists want to take it back as a souvenir."

Pascall has seen a lot of improvement in packaging coming out of Jamaica. He began working with the country in 2010 to improve its packaging of local products, in collaboration with UWI, Mona and the Jamaican government.

He also did work in Guyana. A 2019 Stabroek article said Pascall, then in his capacity as a USAID farmer-to-farmer volunteer, said prospects for that country’s agro-processing sector depended on its raising the level of its labelling and packaging.

Pascall said more work is needed in the region to raise its level of packaging.

As for TT, he says a major way it could earn additional forex is through better packaging of its products for export.

NGO Jegna Institute plans to invite Pascall in May to speak to schools, nationally, to give students an idea of alternative careers.