Nestle confirms major change to Smarties packaging in Australia

One of the most recognisable chocolates will be making a huge change to its most identifiable feature in a world-first move.

We can all feel a bit guilty sometimes reaching for a sweet treat — but a change coming to one chocolate brand might make you feel slightly better about your choice.

From today Nestle’s Smarties is switching to recyclable paper packaging, making it the first confectionary brand in the world to do so.

While some Smarties products are already sold in paper packaging, they will all now be made of solely recyclable paper.

Instead of just its iconic blue background the left hand corner of each new Smarties packaging will come with the brown label: “I’m paper be smart recycle me.”

It’s a move that Nestle says will remove around 250 million plastic packs previously sold around the world each year.

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From today packaging for Smarties will be made on recycled paper.

According to Nestle general manager confectionery Chris O’Donnell, the move is part of the brand’s plan to reduce the use of virgin plastics by a third by 2025.

“Developing safe and convenient paper-based solutions for Smarties has required pioneering new materials and testing by Nestle packaging experts at both our Confectionery R&D Centre in the UK and the Nestle Institute of Packaging Sciences in Switzerland,” he said in a statement.

“We also had to invest in upgrading all the factories that make Smarties. The paper packaging requires careful handling, so we needed to adapt our manufacturing lines to allow for the new formats.”

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Smarties will no longer look like this on supermarket shelves.

The new paper packaging will be manufactured at the Nestle factory in Melbourne’s Campbellfield, which had its machinery upgraded to make the switch.

The recycled paper is sourced sustainably and comes with an Australasian Recycling Label explaining how to recycle the packaging.

Smarties’ move comes after another major company made a similar move, with McDonald’s abandoning its use of plastic straws in all its Australian outlets in February.

The fast food chain also scrapped its use of plastic cutlery, with the move expected to remove 868 metric tonnes of plastic a year from its operations.