Compostable Hot Tray Compound (Thermoforming, 80C, Microwaveable, FDA)

About This Product

This is the tray counterpart to the hot food container: the same 80C rating and microwave suitability, but formulated for sheet extrusion and forming rather than injection moulding, and supplied as a pellet compound with FDA compliance for food contact. The two routes ask different things of a melt, since an injection grade has to flow into a closed tool under pressure while a sheet grade has to hold together as it is reheated and stretched.

A formed tray is a stretched wall rather than a moulded one, and that is what makes heat resistance the governing property here. The material is drawn out of flat sheet and cooled in the tool, which leaves orientation frozen into the wall; warm that wall back towards its softening point with hot food in it and two things happen at once, the modulus falls so the thin section can no longer carry the load, and the frozen orientation relaxes so the tray pulls back towards the shape of the sheet. The 80C rating is what keeps the wall stiff through hot filling and through reheating. In a microwave the field couples into the water in the food rather than into the tray, so the tray is heated mainly by conduction from what it holds, and its service temperature is set by the food; it is the grade for a ready meal tray that a customer puts straight into a microwave, which is the format most chilled ready meals now use. Supplied as a raw material for processing on the buyer's own line; we do not produce finished articles.

It is used in reheatable ready meal trays, hot fill packaging, canteen and airline catering and food service.

Bio Green Foods supplies the compostable hot tray compound to specification on heat resistance, microwave suitability, sheet gauge and food-contact documentation.