Happy Family Organics Right-Sizes Packages Reducing Climate Impact

Posted by on April 25, 2019

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Happy Family Organics started as Happy Baby in 2006 with the mission to “change the trajectory of children’s health through nutrition.” Since then, the company has grown exponentially and continues to offer innovatively packaged organic food options grown without artificial hormones, GMOs, or toxic persistent pesticides.

Alongside the company’s growth, they’ve deepened their commitment to climate action. They’ve made six climate commitments through the Climate Collaborative, and packaging is one of their core priority areas.

Proposed Packaging Adjustments

One of these products is Happy Baby Organic Yogis, a popular freeze dried yogurt and fruit snack and has been the focus of their latest packaging reduction efforts. Happy Family Organics Packaging Development Manager, Marcu Alexander and Director of Sustainability, Katie Clark knew that the Yogis package was bigger and bulkier than necessary and set out to right-size the pouch. Working with their supplier they reduced the height of the pouch and adjusted the size of the outer case while still protecting the product.

Assessing Impacts of Packaging Changes

Happy Family Organics knows that assessing progress in packaging and looking at the full life cycle of packaging emissions is crucial to getting a full picture of their products’ footprints.

Through their partnership with the Climate Collaborative (CC), Happy Family Organics was already working to deepen their industry engagement and improve packaging, and the CC partnership with Trayak allowed them to go even further. Trayak specializes in helping companies to quickly benchmark their existing packaging and using that data to improve the sustainability of their packaging.

The three organizations worked together to collect the Yogis packaging system information (materials, masses, conversion processes, etc.) and perform a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with Trayak’s EcoImpactCOMPASS (Comparative Packaging Assessment) tool.

The collaboration showed that their new design had a positive impact on all phases of the life cycle of the Yogis product from an emissions standpoint, but also from an overall product efficiency and cost perspective.