Packaging for French fries made from potato peels

The design reuses organic waste material to create street food packaging that is biodegradable

Spotted: Milan-based product designers have designed packaging for French fries, made from the discarded potato peels, using the waste in a circular fashion. 

Simone Caronni, Pietro Gaeli and Paolo Stefano Gentile who are students at ​​NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti), created the design as part of a course on ”sustainable design / materials and new technologies for product innovation”. The poetic rendering has won the Naba Design Award 2018 for best technical, materials and innovation project. 

Named “The peel saver” the design takes the form of a cone of about 240 mm in dimension. 

“Fries companies produce a lot of potato peel waste. The idea of ​​this project is to use this waste material in order to create a street food packaging,” said Stefano on his Behance website.  

Potato peels are a great candidate to create packaging because they are made of starch and fibre. To transform the peels into packaging, the peels (which are made up of starches and fibres components, are macerated and naturally dried. This allows them to bond with each other and harden, according to Stefano. The resulting material is fully biodegradable and made entirely from production waste. 

Once you’ve eaten your fries, the designers envision the packaging either being thrown on the floor and to become animal food or used as fertiliser for plants -— reinserting it into the biological cycle. 

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