Why does your food always come in paper bags?

Why does your food always come in paper bags?

Eating to live or living to eat? That’s a funny question you’ll get to hear in both cases if you’re an over-eater or you barely eat. Fast food is pretty much everyone’s guilty pleasure. Be it fried chicken, fish, and chips, burgers, and fries, pizza, everybody can’t get enough of a quick bite to eat every once in a while from their favorite fast-food restaurant. There’s a reason why fast-food chains are some of the world’s largest and richest businesses, for example, McDonald’s, which is the largest chain restaurant business in the world. McDonald’s has 35000 restaurants globally across a total of 119 countries, and each day nearly 68 million customers visit McDonald’s, more than the population of the United Kingdom. That just proves the mass global demand for fast food. If you have been to a variety of different fast-food chain restaurants, you’ll notice that most of them have something in common.

Many fast-food restaurants use food packing paper bags to serve the food in. This piece explains exactly why fast-food restaurants use food packing paper bags and cheap packing paper bags to distribute their food. Remember, fast food restaurants used brown kraft paper bags before plastic waste pollution was a major global issue, so there are many reasons besides environmental benefits.

Paper food bags with handles are much easier to use to wrap food and carry it anywhere than plastic is and paper bags are cheaper than plastic bags. When fast-food chains started to become established, many of them did not originally use their own branded packaging, so, therefore, used food packing paper bags to distribute their food to customers. Using food packing paper bags and brown paper lunch bags for fast food then became a tradition and therefore has been used to package fast food to this day. In the UK, most of fish and chip shops use paper to wrap up the food as it is a tradition. Many fish and chip shops also use boxes for their food. Using eco-friendly paper bags as packaging for the food is a tradition as fish and chips were originally wrapped in newspaper. This was stopped in the United Kingdom in 1990 under the Food Safety Act. Since then, many fish and chip boxes and paper have replicated newspapers, however, it is against the law for the newspaper to be used. This is because it is unhygienic for the newspaper to be used, especially as many of the newspapers that were used were bought from shops where newspapers could have potentially been touched by customers. 

Protects food from Getting Soggy

Pretty much all hot food emits water vapors, oil, and grease if a lot is used, so if plastic packaging or bags were used, the food would become soggy or oily. If the bag was also well sealed, it could also cause a build-up of steam which could potentially burn a customer. If the customer did not get burned, they would get wet or greasy hands when reaching for food, which nobody wants when reaching for a loose French fry at the bottom of the bag. Takeaway pizza is traditionally served in cardboard boxes. If takeaway pizza was served in plastic, the topside of the box would become extremely wet or covered in oil, which would then drip onto the pizza, causing the pizza to be wet. Water going all over the pizza will ruin the pizza and be a waste of food. On the other hand, resealable paper food packing bags are great with food, they do not make food soggy. The best thing about the resealable paper food packing bags is they can be sealed again.

Paper is more friendly than plastic

As previously explained, when fast-food restaurants were first established, the pressure for them to use less plastic was much less as plastic waste pollution was much less of a global issue, however in modern-day, there is much more pressure on fast-food companies to use more paper bags rather than plastic to package their products. An example of this is McDonald’s recently scrapping their plastic McFlurry lids and alternatively folding over the corners of the cardboard cups. McDonald’s also recently scrapped plastic straws and instead started distributing paper straws. This was controversial as the paper straws were becoming soggy and less effective, especially for the thicker drinks such as milkshakes and iced coffee.

Mrbags provide a variety of kraft paper bags, so you can distribute your delicious food in the best quality food packing paper bags or brown kraft paper bags for takeaway. This way, your restaurant’s delicious tasting food will be recognized by its customers, providing you with returning customers that remember the name and face of your business.