Thanks for being such a loyal customer, Elizabeth, and also for voicing your concern about plastic packaging! 

As an employee-owned company and a founding B Corp, caring for the environment is woven right into our triple bottom line of people, planet, profit. From farming practices used out in the field, to packaging, to how we ship products, we want King Arthur’s products to be better for you and gentler on our shared planet, and ramifications around plastic are a regular and serious part of our conversations. 

Our team embraces the complexity of many moving pieces that together make up a good strategy for reducing our footprint. This includes balancing packaging material types against offsets, like decreasing the likelihood for breakage during shipping or the ability to better maintain product freshness. When plastic represents what we believe is the best overall option for a given product, we’re being intentional about selecting plastic that is more recyclable where reasonably possible. For instance, all King Arthur specialty flours in the 3lb resealable bags are now recyclable via store drop-off and include clear How2Recyle identification to help customers recognize how they should be disposed of. 

We also continue to advance aggressive environmental goals that scope out the next eight years, including increasing the amount of post-consumer recycled content in packaging, updating our packaging to be part of a circular system (which works to eliminate waste from all points in the production system), and transitioning our paper packaging to be deforestation-free. While we advance this work, we’re also keeping a close eye on emerging technologies for compostable packaging and other meaningful advances that make sense to adopt. While usable compostable packaging in the market right now requires the use of special equipment not accessible to most, our team is optimistic that a viable option will appear in the relatively near future. 

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