Doing More with Less EVOH: A New Way to Think About Food Packaging Films

Flexible food packaging’s job is difficult. It needs to protect food freshness and safety, hold up through filling and distribution, meet consumer expectations, and fit an increasingly complex regulatory and end-of-life landscape. At the same time, converters and brand owners are being asked to reduce material use, extend shelf-life, maintain performance on high-speed filling and sealing lines, and manage cost.

That is a lot to ask of a film.

In our recent webinar, Doing More with Less EVOH: How to Unlock More from Existing Polymers in Food Packaging, we explored how nanolayered film architectures may offer a new tool for addressing these competing requirements, particularly when it comes to EVOH and oxygen-barrier packaging.

The Challenge with Conventional Film Design

Today’s flexible food packaging films often rely on coextruded or laminated multilayer structures because no single material provides every property a package needs. A typical high-barrier packaging film may include outer layers for durability and printability, inner seal layers, tie layers to join unlike materials, and a barrier material, such as EVOH, in the middle. 

EVOH remains a widely used option in barrier packaging films because it provides excellent oxygen barrier and transparency. But, as with every packaging material, it comes with trade-offs. EVOH can be sensitive to moisture, and its barrier performance, flexibility, processability, and composition must be balanced carefully for the intended package and product.

Meanwhile, packaging designers face a changing set of constraints:

• Evolving food-contact requirements and material restrictions
• Increasing emphasis on recyclability, mono-material structures, and design for recycling
• Extended producer responsibility requirements in parts of the United States
• Consumer interest in lighter-weight, easier-to-use, more transparent packaging
• The need to maintain package performance and run efficiently on existing converting and packaging lines

The question is not simply, “What material should we use?” It is also, “Can we get more from the materials we already know?”

Nanolayering Changes the Architecture

Traditional coextruded multilayer films, whether produced by blown or cast film extrusion, commonly contain a relatively small number of distinct layers. Nanolayering uses a different approach: two or more polymers are arranged in a repeating architecture that can contain dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual layers.

The Peak Nano Films as a Service (FaaS) platform begins with a defined film structure and uses a series of multipliers to split and stack the polymer layers repeatedly. Each pass increases the layer count while reducing the thickness of each individual layer. The result is an architecture in which interfaces between materials become an important driver of performance.

This is more than simply making a conventional multilayer film with additional layers. When layer thickness reaches the micro- and nanoscale, the behavior of the film can change. Interfaces, confinement, crystalline structure, and the way polymers respond to stress can all influence the final properties.

The architecture can be designed around a customer’s objective, whether that is oxygen and moisture barrier performance, toughness, puncture resistance, downgauging, material replacement, or another application-specific need.

Why This Matters for EVOH

For barrier film applications, nanolayering creates an opportunity to reconsider how EVOH is used.

One area of interest is crystalline morphology. EVOH can form spherulitic crystalline structures, and research in other semicrystalline polymer systems suggests that confining layers can encourage more lamellar crystal structures. These structures may create a more tortuous pathway for gas molecules, potentially improving barrier by lowering oxygen transmission rate (OTR) through film architecture rather than relying only on increased material loading.

Another consideration is flex durability. Barrier materials can lose performance when flexing creates defects or cracks. A nanolayered structure may help localize failure rather than allowing one defect to become a bulk failure across the entire film. That same principle has been demonstrated in multilayer systems designed to combine brittle and flexible polymers. As layer count increases, a film can exhibit more ductile overall behavior even when its total composition remains the same.

From Concept to Prototype

Peak Nano’s Films as a Service platform is designed to help customers explore these opportunities without requiring them to build a new R&D capability or commit immediately to a full-scale manufacturing change.

We typically begin by defining the performance target. For food packaging, that might mean improving oxygen or moisture barrier for extended shelf-life, maintaining performance with less EVOH, replacing a material of concern, increasing puncture resistance, or downgauging a structure while retaining seal integrity and functionality. The end use might be a stand-up pouch barrier film, snack food packaging rollstock, a fresh produce lidding film, or a meat and poultry vacuum skin film, and each brings its own balance of barrier, sealing, and mechanical requirements.

From there, we identify candidate polymer families and create a practical experimental plan. We evaluate controls, blends, and low-layer-count structures alongside nanolayered designs to understand whether the added architectural complexity delivers a meaningful advantage. The program then moves through iteration, testing, optimization, and lastly, pilot or production-scale validation.

Because Peak Nano brings R&D, pilot, production, and in-house stretching capabilities together in Ohio, customers can move from an initial idea to custom barrier film samples in weeks and early proof-of-concept work in months, not years.

A Challenge for Packaging Designers

For EVOH and other established polymers, the next breakthrough may not come from inventing an entirely new resin. It may come from redesigning how existing materials work together.

How would you rethink your current flexible packaging film if you could use its architecture—not only its ingredients—to unlock additional performance?

To discuss a specific food packaging challenge or explore a Peak Nano Films as a Service development program, please contact the Peak Nano team.