Tetra Pak has won the Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award (MIMA) 2026 in the Scale! category for its next-generation automation and digital portfolio, Tetra Pak® Factory OS™. The Scale! award recognises intelligent industrial solutions leading the way in the breadth of value chains, clients or internal processes they impact, across different levels of maturity.
Tetra Pak® Factory OS™ is a suite of modular, open and scalable smart factory technologies designed for food and beverage production. By unifying automation, data and analytics into a consistent, factorywide operating environment, it connects equipment regardless of age or supplier, transforming fragmented factory data into a unified, contextualised, real-time view.
The judges recognised Tetra Pak® Factory OS™ for its ability to help food and beverage producers expand output, introduce new products more quickly and reduce production costs in an increasingly challenging geopolitical and economic environment. As rising food prices and input costs place pressure on food producers, the platform enables food and beverage producers to improve efficiency and strengthen operational resilience while safeguarding product quality.
Deployable across sites with varying levels of digital maturity, Tetra Pak® Factory OS™ strengthens operational performance, accelerates digital transformation at scale and opens new growth opportunities by bringing coherence, repeatability and intelligence to endtoend factory operations. Built with security-by-design and layered defences to protect operations and data amid today’s heightened geopolitical cyber risk, it provides an AI-ready foundation that turns real-time data into contextualised insights for faster, smarter decisions.
The Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award (MIMA) recognises innovative industrial solutions that drive measurable impact through intelligent manufacturing technologies. Granted by Microsoft and Roland Berger, the award followed a competitive evaluation process. Tetra Pak was shortlisted and presented its solution to an independent jury before being named winner in the Scale! category. Tetra Pak® Factory OS™ will be formally recognised at Hannover Messe on 22 April 2026.
Zotefoams, a world leader in cellular materials, announced that ReZorce, its sustainable mono-material barrier packaging range, has been named winner in the Product Innovation category at the 2024 Reuters Sustainability Awards.
This year, 700 entries from 50 countries contested 17 categories judged by an international panel of business leaders, academics, designers and changemakers in the field of sustainability. ReZorce won the Product Innovation category ahead of 13 other shortlisted entrants including other aseptic liquid packaging board (LPB) beverage cartons and packaging innovations.
Currently available aseptic beverage cartons – used for products such as fruit juices which are not refrigerated – are produced from composite layers of wood fibre, aluminium and polymer bonded together (LPB). Unlike ReZorce, these composite materials cannot be recycled through mainstream processes. ReZorce on the other hand has a mono-material design which leads to excellent performance in standard Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs). The resulting recyclate can be reused, including in the core of ReZorce cartons, bringing the prospect of circularity to the 250 billion unit-per-annum beverage carton market for the first time.
Zotefoams is currently in the latter stages of developing ReZorce for beverage carton applications and is preparing for trials with a north European supermarket chain.
During the Awards ceremony on October 1, judge Danielle Holly, Associate Director of the Aspen Institute, commented, “The judges thought [ReZorce] was an excellent and practical step towards fully recyclable packaging for widely used food and beverage formats. It’s exciting, it’s disruptive and it will really deliver an immense impact in everyday lives. Well done for pioneering it!”
Ronan Cox, Zotefoams Group CEO, comments, “We are delighted that ReZorce has been recognised on the global stage in this way. Entrants to the Reuters Sustainability Awards include some of the world’s best-known and most-admired companies and it is an honour for Zotefoams to stand alongside them.
“It is also telling that the judges recognised the need for wholesale change rather than incremental improvement in pack formats such as aseptic beverage cartons.
“This award which follows recent success in the Deutsche Verpackungsinstitut’s German Packaging Awards, serves as further confirmation that ReZorce is a much-needed product with a bright future. We are 100 % focussed on translating these award achievements into on-shelf success, as ReZorce looks to finally bring a truly sustainable solution to the aseptic carton industry and beyond.”
