Milliken and Picnic Plast

When Picnic Plast Industrial Co. Ltd., a leading maker of household products in Thailand, wanted to launch a new range of durable food-storage containers, it turned to a long-time, reliable partner for help.

Working in conjunction with Milliken, the Bangkok-based firm chose to use a copolymer polypropylene (PP) clarified with Milliken’s Millad® NX® 8000 ECO additive to give its end products the clarity and transparency it demanded. “The new range — launched in mid-2019 in major department stores and online — contains 30 containers of different shapes and sizes”, according to Surachai Thiamchivasin, Picnic’s Corporate Sales & Marketing Manager. They are being sold as part of Picnic’s premium, private-label ClipPac brand.

The resulting products, he said, needed to meet a number of key requirements, including being safe for use in contact with food, in microwaves, freezers, and dishwashers, while also being airtight and leak-proof. 

But clarity, transparency and impact resistance were vital properties in choosing to use an NX® UltraClear™ PP resin, which can only be made using Milliken’s additive. Using this resin “made us brighter and clearer than other plastic food storage containers on the shelf,” Thiamchivasin said.

With sustainability in mind, Picnic also valued the fact that products injection molded from NX UltraClear™ PP resin formulated with Millad NX 8000 ECO offer faster production rates, and average energy savings of 10% for the production of clarified PP parts certified by the UL (Underwriters Laboratories) label. “This”, notes Sirikorn Prateeppavameta, Milliken account manager for South Asia, “enables brand owners such as Picnic to apply the coveted UL Environmental Claim Validation label to their product, providing a marketing advantage by helping to communicate the company’s sustainability commitment to its customers.”