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The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 2024–2025

Nestlé made cheese wrap itself in a bioplastic from its whey

Nestlé and Ogilvy Colombia made a packaging bioplastic from cheese whey, so the byproduct of making cheese replaces its plastic wrapper.

Nestlé

the move

Plastic packaging on cheese is discarded as soon as the product is opened, yet making it consumes new plastic. Nestlé Central America set out to remove that wrapper from its ¡Qué Rico! cheeses sold in Panama.

With Ogilvy Colombia it developed Self-Packing Cheese: a bioplastic made from lactosuero, the whey left over from making cheese. Because it comes from the same production process, the material is a byproduct turned into packaging rather than new plastic.

The packaging is designed to biodegrade completely in about 300 days. Nestlé planned to produce 5,500 tons of ¡Qué Rico! cheese in Panama and to replace both primary and secondary packaging with the whey-based material.

The idea reframes packaging from an input to a recycled output of the product itself, which is the essence of a circular model.

why it works

  • Cheese production already generates whey, so the raw material costs nothing new.
  • Making the wrapper from a byproduct removes the need to buy plastic resins.
  • Whey-based packaging biodegrades fully in about 300 days rather than persisting.
  • The product and its packaging now come from the same process, closing the loop.
the payoffA byproduct provides the product's own packagingclever

what transfers

Use a production byproduct to solve a production problem; packaging made from the product's own waste closes the loop and removes plastic entirely.

what came after

The prototype was tested as a substitute for the primary and secondary packaging of Nestlé ¡Qué Rico! cheese in Panama, with the aim of rolling it out across the range. It was shortlisted in the Innovation category at Cannes Lions 2025 and was widely covered in the packaging trade press.

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