Luxury Packaging 2024 | Metsä Group

The search for excellence in Metsä Group

From lush forests to increasingly innovative paper-based solutions

Metsä Group is a Finnish forest industry group with 9500 employees in around 30 countries and an annual sales amount to approximately EUR 7 billion. Their focus on the growth sectors of the forest industry are wood supply and forest services, wood products, pulp, fresh fibre paperboards, as well as tissue and greaseproof papers. The raw material for their products is renewable wood from sustainably managed northern forests.

Metsä Board, part of Metsä Group, is a leading European producer of premium fresh fibre paperboards and exhibited its sustainable and innovative products at Luxe Pack 2023. There ItaliaImballaggio met Gunilla Nykopp, Customer Experience Manager at Metsä Board, who told us, in particular, about the Excellence Centre, Metsä Board’s research and innovation centre, which opened 2020 in the middle of the pandemic. There, their pillars of product development are making innovation and sustainability.

Boosting innovation

Growing consumption and demand for more sustainable packaging is boosting the need for new innovations. To develop solutions for packaging today and into the future, Metsä Board has started up operations in its new Excellence Centre at the unique bioeconomy site in Äänekoski, Finland. The centre, with its cutting-edge technology for R&D, packaging design and paperboard and packaging performance, aims to accelerate material and packaging innovation and provide a collaboration platform for customers and technology partners globally.

The Excellence Centre, which covers a total of 1,500 square meters, includes R&D facilities, a packaging design studio, a customer feedback centre and a state-of-the art laboratory providing more than 100 different measurement methods and analytics. The centre also features a virtual store and a computer-aided engineering (CAE) tool to allow sophisticated simulation and analysis of packaging performance.

Metsä Board’s Excellence Centre brings together Metsä Board’s own competencies and deep expertise in fibre-based solutions with that of various experts and partners, such as material suppliers, technology providers, start-up companies, universities and research companies. Virtual collaboration workshops have also been developed to enable joint development and co-creation if physical meetings are not possible.

«Renewable and recyclable fresh fibre paperboard can be utilized for packaging in many ways. Fibre-based packaging has a lot to offer, and together with our partners and the new Excellence Centre, we are able to explore the possibilities even more comprehensively. I am excited about the opportunities this will bring for today and the future» says Gunilla Nykopp.

At Luxe Pack Metsä Board displayed its wide product range in a Design Lab area, where visitors were able to get their hands on several physical packaging concepts made with specially engineered fresh fibre paperboards, including lightweight folding boxboards with high yield and excellent printability, white kraftliners and fully recyclable dispersion barrier boards perfect for reducing plastics.

New complex shapes

In particular the 3D fibre packaging solutions Muoto™ caught special attention. Muoto products manufactured at Metsä Group’s demo plant in Äänekoski are made of wet wood-fibre pulp and can be shaped into rounded, complex shapes familiar from the plastics industry. The protype packaging for a pair of Fiskars’ scissors, including inner packaging made from Muoto and a paperboard encasing, found its shape through workshops held at at Metsä Board’s Excellence Centre.

«Plastic is everywhere, and while it will continue to play a role in the future, there are countless end uses in which we can use a renewable and recyclable bioproduct instead of plastic», closes Gunilla Nykopp.