The Packaging Experts Who Just Earned a Top Food Science Honor
Most winners of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Research and Development Award spend their careers in a food lab. Diana Maya and Edgard Chow spent theirs on food packaging. The two Kuraray America, Inc. leaders received the 2026 award in Chicago this summer, one of the highest honors in food science, and the choice says something about where food innovation is actually happening. Increasingly, it happens at the package.
Chow, Director of Technical Opportunity Management, and Maya, Regional Market Development Manager–Americas, led the team. They shared the award with Dr. Juming Tang and Dr. Shyam Sablani of Washington State University and the late Dr. Louise Wicker of Louisiana State University. Dr. Wicker's leadership, scientific excellence, and passion for advancing food systems left a lasting impact on the project and on the many colleagues and students she inspired throughout her career. Before her passing earlier this year, she selected Dr. Yookyung Kim of Korea University to accept the award on her behalf.
The project, "Innovative Barrier Packaging for Emerging Food Processing Technologies," spanned two decades, bringing together experts in materials science, packaging engineering, food processing, and sustainable food systems into the same room.
A barrier most people never notice
Almost everyone has held a package containing EVAL™ EVOH resin without realizing it. The Ethylene Vinyl Alcohol (EVOH) copolymer, pioneered by Kuraray, is the reason a coextruded package can be wafer-thin and still protect what is inside. As a microscopic layer buried in the structure, it blocks the oxygen that turns food rancid, locks in flavor and aroma, and buys perishable products weeks or months of extra shelf life, all while using far less material than the packaging it replaced.
Kuraray began producing EVOH before coextrusion became a mainstream process, so the earliest food uses were laminated rather than coextruded. One of the first was bonito flake, the dried, shaved fish that lends Japanese soups their umami. Decades of refinement followed. Today's EVAL™ EVOH resin grades are thermally stable enough that converters can run their coextrusion lines around the clock and clean them just once a year, and the resin can be shaped by nearly every melt process in the industry, from blown and cast film to thermoforming, blow molding, and extrusion coating.
The barrier a grade provides largely depends on its ethylene content, which is why Kuraray produces a spectrum of EVAL™ grades rather than a single grade. Every day, meat, cheese, and snack packs sit in the middle of the range, served by core grades such as EVAL™ F171B, H171B, and E171B at 32 to 44 mole percent ethylene. Wine and tomato-based products, far less forgiving of oxygen, sit at the demanding end, where EVAL™ L171B at 27 mole percent draws a higher barrier from less material. The newest generation, EVAL™ SC, adds orientability between the polymer's glass transition and crystallization temperatures, which simplifies the design of high-performance structures that have long been difficult to recycle, including those that rely on Polyvinylidene Chloride (PVdC) or high levels of Polyamide. With every EVAL plant now carrying International Sustainability and Carbon Certification PLUS (ISCC PLUS), the door is also open to renewable and circular feedstocks.
Learn More About the ISCC PLUS Certification Here: Kuraray America’s EVAL Business Unit Earns ISCC PLUS Certification | Kuraray America, Inc.
Two experts, two halves of the same problem
Packaging and food processing have advanced on separate tracks for decades. A food scientist would perfect a new way to sterilize food and make it taste good, then find out whether any package could survive the process. Maya and Chow built their careers attacking that disconnect from opposite ends.
Chow supplied the materials and polymer-processing depth, the work of a technical lead who has spent more than twenty years building and stress-testing prototypes at the Kuraray Research and Technical Center, hosting doctoral students through long lab summers, and putting his name on the studies that proved the results in many patents.
Maya supplied the path to market. She built the EVAL value proposition across North and South America, drove regional adoption of high-barrier flexible packaging, and connected Kuraray's materials know-how to the food scientists who needed it. She is equally at home in both rooms, able to talk to a customer through the time-and-temperature math of a sterilization curve and the supply-chain economics and environmental impacts that follow from getting the package right. To her, that crossover is the whole job.
In her words, "We are the experts in packaging, and they are the experts in food science, and the continuous collaboration is the key to success."
What they proved
The doubt Chow, Maya, and their team had to overcome was genuine. The newer sterilization methods subject a package to heat, pressure, moisture, and, in some cases, physical agitation or pressure enough that much of the industry assumed plastic would fail. It did not. Partnering with the universities, the team validated structures with a layer of high-barrier EVAL™ EVOH resin across three processes: Microwave Assisted Thermal Sterilization (MATS) and Pressure Assisted Thermal Sterilization (PATS) with Washington State University, and Shaka® agitated retort with Louisiana State University.
What made the work matter was not only that plastic survived, but also what these methods do for food. Each one drives the lethal temperature to the cold center of the package faster, inactivating bacteria and the heat-resistant spores, such as Clostridium botulinum, that low-acid foods demand. Reaching that kill point quickly means less total heat, so color, texture, nutritional content, and flavor hold up far better than they do under conventional retort, and the package endures less abuse in the bargain. The barrier was the catch. A film that wilts at sterilization temperature is useless, and traditional retort runs near 121°C (about 250°F) for anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours, long enough to damage an ordinary plastic bag.
The measurements made the argument. Films coextruded with EVAL™ EVOH resin maintained an oxygen transmission rate (OTR) below 2 cc/m2.d after MATS processing and after a year of storage. Recyclable polypropylene trays coextruded with EVAL™ EVOH resin served as a substitute for aluminum foil trays, even when using 25% less polypropylene. Films containing EVAL™ EVOH resin held their barrier under PATS even when running 20% thinner. Films coextruded with EVAL™ EVOH resin came through 120 reciprocal shakes per minute and an hour at 121°C intact under Shaka® retort, holding OTR below 1.5 cc/m2.d, results substantial enough to earn multiple U.S. and Japanese patents. Read together, they point in one direction: packaging that is 70% to 90% lighter, consumes up to 50% less energy, and has a carbon footprint roughly 40% lower, while maintaining food safety, shelf life, and cost.
Packaging expert and IFT Fellow Dr. Claire Sand called the group "essentially a dream team that allowed these food processing technologies to move forward."
Heat is not the only way to make food safe, and the team proved just as capable of innovating where heat is the enemy. Working with equipment maker Hiperbaric, Chow validated flexible structures for High-Pressure Processing (HPP), a cold method that relies on pressure rather than temperature and has since become routine for avocado puree, refrigerated soups, and hummus, products that brown or break down if cooked. Set side by side, the processes form a spectrum, from High-Pressure and Microwave-Assisted Sterilization through pasteurization, ultra-high-temperature to full retort treatment, and across the entire range, the EVAL™ EVOH resin grades carry the barrier.
Chow, characteristically, hands the credit to the collaboration itself, to the materials know-how and the "creativity and the courage to collaborate with giants in the food science industry" that, in his telling, the award really honors.
From the laboratory to the shelf
None of it stayed theoretical. Chow's signature project traces back to Colombia in 2004, when the ICONTEC, the Colombian Institute of Technical Standards and Certification, equivalent to the ISO, developed a technical standard for aseptic UHT milk, including packaging requirements. The brief was exacting for a pouch. One liter of milk, sterilized and filled with an aseptic form-fill-seal line was expected to be protected for 3 months without refrigeration, in a pouch that was typically no thicker than 100 microns. Hitting it required a layered solution, an oxygen barrier to prevent fat from turning rancid, a light barrier to prevent photo-oxidation, a flavor barrier to prevent any aroma contamination from the outside or maintaining the vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate variants, and enough mechanical toughness to survive filling, shipping, and the family pantry.
The answer was an 85-micron, 7-layer blown polyethylene film with a core of EVAL™ EVOH, white-pigmented faced out, a black-pigmented layer, a clean sealant facing the milk, and the tie layers between them were tuned so the structure would not delaminate. The finished pouch weighed about seven grams and accounted for roughly a quarter of the carton's weight and cost. Several brands handed the difference to shoppers, trimming the price of milk by about 10 percent or filling 1.1 liters into a one-liter bag.
EVOH was the only barrier that gave the structure the margin of safety the tropics required, where heat is high, and the cold chain cannot be assumed, and the format has since spread from Colombia across Peru, Mexico, and Central America into Argentina.
For both leaders, engineering is not the part worth retelling. Because the pouch was shelf-stable, milk could be transported without refrigeration to remote corners of Colombia, reach families through government feeding programs, and improve nutrition for children who had been going without. Brands could supply distribution centers instead of running refrigerated trucks daily, and the spoiled milk returns that had long plagued the category all but disappeared. That is the result the team cites when asked why two decades were worth it.
The same approach keeps producing. In Latin America, Alexander Giraldo Gil, R&D Head of Packaging Projects, Thermal Processing, Emerging Technologies and the Pilot Plant at Zenu, part of the Nutresa Group in Colombia, commented that he worked with Kuraray materials over the years from the lab to market and “successfully downgauged film structures for thermoformed trays by 40%, maintaining barrier and seal integrity, while achieving ~40% reduction in carbon footprint at a competitive price versus incumbent tray structures. This innovation is now commercially available in 20 SKUs across 2 countries, sparing 37 metric tons of resin so far”... “The team also engineered potentially recyclable lids for shelf-stable meat, a sustainable alternative not previously available in the market”. In India, Tata Q Foods now runs MATS lines that produce 35 ready-to-eat meals a minute in EVAL™ EVOH resin barrier packaging, on 915 Labs equipment rated to process up to 17 million trays a year. In the United States, the Army Natick lab is evaluating packaging for modernized field rations, with the potential to improve food quality for 3 million soldiers. Around the commercial work sits a long teaching record, more than 100 conferences, more than 120 published papers, more than 18 boot camps that have trained food companies and walked them through regulatory approvals, and well over 100 students and professionals mentored along the way.
That history makes the team careful to understate the sustainability story rather than oversell it. The recyclability recognition EVAL™ EVOH resin earned from the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR) is, by design, a technical compatibility assessment. It certifies that the structure will not foul a recycling stream. It does not certify that the package will be recycled, which still hinges on whether shoppers can get it to collection and whether the local facility can sort it. Maya and Chow are direct about that gap, and about the fact that closing it will require brands, converters, recyclers, and regulators to move together.
Read more on the APR Design® Recognition: Kuraray America, Inc. Earns APR Design® Recognition for EVAL™ EVOH Barrier Resin | Kuraray America, Inc.
A bridge worth building
That same plainspokenness underlies the case Maya has been making for years, that packaging gets treated as the final decision in food development when it belongs among the first. Packaging, in her framing, "can be a solution and needs to be considered from the beginning in food science to optimize the whole process and extend shelf life or become cheaper." Chow argues the same point from a deliberately neutral stance. A metal can still earn its place in food service, glass where consumers reuse it, plastic where weight and waste argue for it, and he insists the honest comparison runs through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) rather than instinct. Paper reads as greener because it grows on a tree, he notes, but a tree takes decades, and most paper still needs a barrier layer to do the job at all.
The demand side is shifting fast enough to keep the questions open. Clean-label reformulations that strip preservatives push medium-barrier packs toward high barrier. Plant-based proteins oxidize as readily as meat, sometimes faster. The small, protein-dense formats favored by GLP-1 users pack more into less space. All of it raises the barrier bar at the same moment that extended producer responsibility (EPR) rules, written state by state with no shared definition, are reshaping what a compliant package even looks like. Kuraray's answer is to pair EVAL™ EVOH resin with active functions such as oxygen scavenging and to push barrier value upstream, into bulk and aseptic formats that cut refrigeration energy and keep grain, edible oil, and juice concentrate sound far longer than the supply chain manages today.
Chow will press the argument from a bigger chair, as head of the 2026 to 2027 IFT Food Packaging Division, where he wants to close what he calls the knowledge gap "between materials experts in the packaging industry and formulation experts in the food industry."
The hardest packaging problems get solved by people willing to test, fail, and try again together, across fields that rarely share a table. That is what the IFT chose to recognize this year.