ZURICH — Packaging company Amcor announced a partnership with Chinese premium pet food brand Ge Wu An to launch the Li Kou wet pet food cup, an inverted-cup packaging format, in China.

The packaging technology allows pet parents to peel, invert, tear and lift to release the wet pet food into the bowl without scraping or scooping. The format features a polypropylene cup with a top lidding film and bottom seal film.

The Li Kou cup was created to solve consumer frustrations with existing wet pet food can packaging, which include sharp edges, broken pull rings and residual product left in the can.

“The development of this new product was driven by real pain points that pet owners face every day,” said Liu Mengru, brand lead at Ge Wu An. “We wanted to completely optimize the experience from opening to serving — so pets get complete nutrition and owners spend less time cleaning up, raising the everyday feeding experience from the ground up.”

The cup-and-film format provides a lightweight alternative to traditional aluminum cans, which not only uses less material per unit but also reduces product weight which can reduce transportation costs.

Amcor’s Catalyst™ is a collaborative co-development platform that helps brands design, test and launch new packaging solutions. Amcor and Ge Wu An came together through the Catalyst program to develop the Li Kou solution. Working together for more than a year, the teams combined Ge Wu An’s pet parent and wet pet food market knowledge base with Amcor’s packaging expertise and development capabilities to create the packaging solution.

“Through Catalyst, we work alongside customers from the earliest stages of development to turn ideas into commercially viable packaging solutions,” said Jessica Chen, marketing and product management director for Amcor Flexibles China. “Li Kou demonstrates how packaging innovation can help pet food brands differentiate through the consumer experience, from how a product is opened to how it is served.”

Read more about packaging solutions and trends for pet food and treats.