American coffeshops, take note: A big business at the 400 Costa Coffee cafés in the UK is selling beverages for takeout. The chain had been using grey, molded-pulp trays—both boring and space-hungry. The challenge: Find an alternative multi-cup carrier that was cost-effective, eye-catching, space-efficient and environmentally sustainable.

The solution: PortaDrink™ from Maldon, England, packaging designer PortaBrands, Ltd. (www.portabottle.com). The one-handed carrier, which holds two, three or four cups, is sheetfed-offset or web-fed flexo printed in up to six colors by converter The MSO Group (www.mso.co.uk) at its Manchester, England, and Belfast, Northern Ireland, plants.

Another cornerstone of the new cup carrier is paperboard from Forest Stewardship Council-managed forests (www.fsc.org), which means raw material is sourced in an environmentally responsible, sustainable manner. PortaBrands specified Frövi Carry—a 370-gsm substrate from Korsnäs AB (www.korsnas.com). The four-layer fiberboard has an unbleached bottom layer and a chlorine-free bleached, clay-coated top layer for high-quality printing.

Now, customers act as Costa Café billboards on the street with carriers sporting the brand's color and logo.

Building on the currently popular stick-pack trend, Tstix®, from the Stuttgart, Germany, inventor of the same name (www.tstix.eu), aim to replace the old-fashioned “porous bag of tea on a tagged string” package with a 21st century alternative. Made from a proprietary foil laminate with more than 1,100 micro-perforations set in a diamond pattern in its side, the Tstix tube is both a teabag and teaspoon in one. Users stir the hot water with the stick pack until the tea is their desired color.

Patented in several European countries, the Tstix package is available under license. Printed material rolls are already being converted by Alcan Packaging-Sarrebourg, France (www.alcan.com), and Amcor Packaging-Mochheim, Germany (www.amcor.com). “A lot of companies can make holes, but very few can achieve the precision accuracy we have across a printed web—with around 1,200 holes of less than 0.5 mm in size in every Tstix made,” says Geoff Stuart, Tstix international licensing. A standard 12-lane form-fill-seal machine reportedly produces up to 480 Tstix per minute, he adds.

Don't like tea? The Tstix stick pack works just as well with instant coffee and other powdered beverage mixes, the inventor says.

In what is said to be a first for pharmaceutical-blister packaging, Somerville, NJ, converter Tekni-Films' TEKNIFLEX® Modified Atmosphere Blister (MAB) (www.tekni-films.com) unites CSP Technologies' Activ-Strips® polyethylene dessicant strip into the rib design of the blister card, linking every cavity with the dessicant. A choice of either Aclar® or VapoShield® barrier films in the patented technology—along with the dessicant—reduce headspace moisture content to extend the shelf life of drugs.

Performance can be tailored by using different film thicknesses, sheet sizes (surface area), and the number or type of dessicant, Tekni-Films says. For example, three Activ-Strips® reportedly guarantee a dry headspace for two years at 25 deg C/65% RH.