The winners of the Sustainability Awards 2025, organised by Packaging Europe, have been announced during the Sustainable Packaging Summit in Utrecht. Among this year’s laureates, Xampla and Just Eat Takeaway took the E-Commerce (Commercialised) category with a plastic-free, corrugated food-to-go box lined with Morro™ Coating.
The winning solution is a fibre-based takeaway box designed for hot and cold dishes in delivery, serve-over and hot-hold environments. At its core is a corrugated board structure, manufactured at scale by Huhtamaki, combined with Xampla’s Morro Coating: a plant-based, plastic-free barrier derived from natural polymers. The coating is engineered to deliver the grease and moisture resistance demanded by foodservice while remaining biodegradable, home compostable and compatible with paper recycling streams.
The award-winning box is already being piloted on the market through Lieferando, Just Eat Takeaway’s platform in Germany. Restaurant partners can order the new packaging via the Lieferando Partner Webshop, potentially giving more than 40,000 outlets access to a plastic-free alternative for their food-to-go menus. Earlier trials in the UK, via Just Eat for Business, have helped to validate performance in real delivery conditions, from kitchen handling through to last-mile logistics.
By recognising this solution in the E-Commerce category, the Sustainability Awards jury sends a clear signal about how food delivery and quick-commerce are reshaping the innovation agenda for packaging. Corrugated boxes have long been the workhorse of e-commerce logistics; pairing them with advanced, non-plastic barrier coatings now allows fibre-based formats to move further into applications that were historically dominated by plastic-lined or multilayer structures.
The timing is far from accidental. Across Europe, regulators are tightening the rules on both single-use plastics and PFAS in food-contact applications. The new EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) introduces stringent limits on intentionally added PFAS in food packaging from 2026, pushing brand owners and converters to find scalable, compliant alternatives to conventional fluorinated barriers. In this context, plastic-free and PFAS-free coatings such as Morro are being closely watched as potential enablers of next-generation fibre-based food packaging.
Equally important is the collaborative model behind the winning entry. Xampla, as a materials science innovator, has developed the coating; Huhtamaki, as a global converter, has translated it into industrially produced corrugated and folding boxes; Just Eat Takeaway, as a major delivery platform, is creating a route-to-market through its network of restaurant partners. This kind of three-way partnership – material supplier, converter, and high-volume brand or platform – is increasingly essential to move sustainable packaging concepts from lab scale to everyday reality.
For the takeaway sector, the Morro-coated box also illustrates a broader shift in narrative. Sustainability is no longer only about reducing plastic weight or switching to a different polymer; it is about rethinking the role of fibres, coatings and barrier technologies in an ecosystem where circularity, chemical safety and consumer perception must be balanced. A fibre-based box that can be recycled with paper after use, or composted at home where facilities and behaviour allow, speaks directly to both regulatory expectations and consumer demand for simpler, more intuitive end-of-life options.
The Sustainability Awards 2025 jury evaluated entries from across the world, from new recycling processes and reusable systems to digital tools for circularity. In this landscape, the choice of a corrugated, plant-based coated takeaway box as the E-Commerce winner underlines how everyday foodservice packaging is becoming a key testing ground for sustainable innovation. For players in food, retail and logistics, the Xampla–Just Eat Takeaway case offers a concrete example of how to align performance, compliance and brand positioning around a single, market-ready solution.
Image Credits: Xampla
