The Waitrose Supermarket chain has pulled the milk pouches that are eco-friendly out of its stores. This was done because of low sales figures on what was touted as innovative products. They were leading to too much waste when used by consumers.

The store chain had to discontinue carrying these pouches. Customers liked the traditional plastic bottles better that the pouches. The bottles even cost more but that did not matter to the consumers. The store chain has decided to work at minimizing packaging in other ways.

This innovative product was touted to be a change how milk was being sold because the pouch has 75% less of the plastic compared to the traditional bottles do. These bottles provide Britons with two thirds of the containers of milk they buy each week, which equals some 180 million of the pints. It requires lower energy consumption to make the pouches. Even though they require less space to dispose of them, the people that used them had a hard time with them spilling along with leaking. The plastic bottles are preferred for this reason.

In the UK consumers have purchased their milk in bottles since the year 1880 when the bottles were made from glass. Then later on the plastic bottles was the favorite for milk and stayed popular until the 1970s when the cardboard Tetra Pak containers came into being. The milk in bags was preferred in other areas of the world though. The pouch and jug were made to go into the refrigerator were the most popular with Canadians.

Waitrose brought out the new containers three years ago when the trials were finished on them, there seemed to be a demand for them at the time. In spite of the fact that back during the 1970s the idea flopped. Waitrose thought the pouches for the milk would be popular with the eco-friendly consumers of today. The total sales showed a different story.

Now over at Sainsbury which brought out the milk bags last month, across the nation, showed promising results in 50 stores. The sales climbed to about 110,000 a week. Today one bag of milk if bought for each 10 two-pint containers sold in the semi-skimmed. This is double was this supermarket had predicted originally. By the year 2015, Sainsbury hopes to reduce the packaging it is reported. Changing over to the bags possibly will save as much as 1.4m kg in materials each year for packaging. They would also mean a savings in energy and oil over the traditional packaging for milk. The Co-op, Marks  Spencer along with Tesco are not doing to milk in pouches.

Educating the buyers is the secret to succeeding according to the senior dairy buyer at Sainsbury, Emma Metcalf-King. According to a statement she made the sales went way beyond what the company had expected. The store management gave the employees some jugs for free so they knew how they worked. Therefore they became the top ambassadors for the product because they could testify to personally using them to the customers.