“Food is perishable, packaging is not.” That is the simple truth behind Precision Plastic Products’ “Plastic Has a Soul” philosophy, says General Manager Mr Sajeed Abdul Lathief ahead of Gulfood Manufacturing 2026. For him, a pack’s job is not finished when it leaves the factory floor. It protects products, preserves quality and reduces waste, all the way from production into people’s homes.
Every conversation about food security eventually comes back to production: how food is grown, manufactured and supplied. But there is another part of the equation that deserves equal attention: how effectively that food is protected, from the moment it leaves the production line until the last drop is consumed at home, particularly as food production and distribution across the UAE and Saudi Arabia expand quickly.
“Food security does not end with food production,” Sajeed says. “Once food has been produced, it still needs to be protected, stored and transported until it reaches the consumer, and packaging continues to protect it long after that. Packaging plays an important role in that journey, from the factory floor to the family fridge.”
“Plastic Has a Soul”: A Life That Continues Long After the Factory Gate
This belief is captured directly in Precision Plastic Products’ own philosophy, “Plastic Has a Soul”.
“Food is perishable, packaging is not,” he says. “That is exactly why we say “Plastic Has a Soul”. Its purpose is complete only when the last drop of the food inside it has been consumed.”
“Even inside a home refrigerator or a kitchen cupboard, packaging continues to do its job, protecting freshness and extending shelf life until the food inside it is fully used,” Sajeed says. “It protects food during transport, on the retail shelf and, just as importantly, in the customer’s home. That is where packaging truly proves its worth.”
Food Security Starts With Local Availability
For Precision Plastic Products, food security and resilience are closely connected to the availability of food, and of the packaging that protects it, exactly where and when it is needed.
“Food security is about the availability of food locally,” Sajeed says. “But food cannot reach people without packaging that is also available locally, at the right time and in the right quantity, to preserve and transport it. Packaging completes food production. Without it, production alone does not reach the consumer.”
“Resilience means looking beyond individual stages of the food system,” he says. “Food production, processing, packaging, storage and transportation are all connected. If one part does not perform effectively, the impact is felt across the value chain.”
The Pressure To Balance Performance And Sustainability
The packaging industry across the region is solving an increasingly complex equation: reliable protection and consistent performance, produced efficiently on modern, high-speed processing equipment, alongside growing pressure to design for a circular economy and keep materials in use for as long as possible.
“Efficient production is part of sustainability,” Sajeed says. “Investing in efficient processing equipment reduces waste at the manufacturing stage itself, before a single pack even reaches a customer. That efficiency, combined with recyclable design, is what makes a packaging operation genuinely sustainable.”
Sajeed believes circularity, keeping plastic in productive use rather than as single-use waste, is the most important measure of long-term sustainability.
“Circularity of material is the most important part of this conversation,” he says. “It is not just about using less material or making it recyclable. It is about designing packaging so the material can have another life.”
What Precision Plastic Products Is Looking Forward To At Gulfood Manufacturing
As Precision Plastic Products prepares to exhibit at Gulfood Manufacturing 2026, Sajeed says the company is looking forward to engaging directly with customers, industry partners and technology providers.
“The value of Gulfood Manufacturing is the opportunity to have conversations with the people shaping the industry,” he says. “It gives us the chance to understand what customers are dealing with today and where their requirements are heading.”
Circularity and Sustainability: The Trend Reshaping Packaging Design
Across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the clearest shift underway in food packaging is not any single material or format, it is the move towards circularity and sustainability as the starting point for design, rather than an afterthought.
For Sajeed, mono-material packaging is one of the clearest ways this shift shows up: structures built from a single material family rather than multiple layers, simplifying recycling and improving the consistency of recovered material streams.
“Using a single material family throughout a pack makes it easier to recycle effectively and gives converters and recyclers a cleaner material to work with,” he says. “But the real story is circularity itself, making sure a pack has a life after the food inside it is gone.”
This is where Precision Plastic Products’ strength lies: a full, 360-degree view of packaging, considering material, structure, production efficiency, protection and end of life together, rather than as separate decisions.
“We do not simply follow this direction, we apply it,” Sajeed says. “Taking a full, 360-degree view of packaging is how we design solutions, looking at the material, the production process, the protection it offers and what happens to it after use, all at the same time.”
Alongside circularity, lightweighting continues to shape how packaging is engineered, using structural design and simulation tools to reduce material in a pack without compromising its ability to protect the product.
“It is about engineering a pack that uses exactly what it needs to protect the product properly, no more and no less,” Sajeed says. “That reduces material costs and environmental impact while maintaining performance.”
Where The Market Is Heading
Sajeed sees the packaging market in the UAE and Saudi Arabia moving towards greater material efficiency, logistics efficiency and a stronger focus on the full lifecycle of packaging. At the same time, he believes product protection must remain central to the discussion.
“The industry cannot look at sustainability separately from performance,” he says. “We need solutions that protect food effectively, use resources responsibly and can be produced efficiently at scale and recycled efficiently.”
Taken together, these trends point to an industry moving towards a more integrated approach, one where packaging is judged by the value it delivers across the entire food system, from factory to family home. The company’s one-gallon bottle, the lightest bottle in the region, is proof of what that looks like in practice: a lighter design that reduces plastic material use while improving logistics efficiency, so more milk fits on every truck.
“Food security is a chain,” Sajeed concludes. “Packaging is one link in that chain, making sure food reaches consumers safely, reliably and with the quality the producer intended, right up until the last drop is consumed.”
That is the fullest sense of what Precision Plastic Products means when it says “Plastic Has a Soul”. Its purpose does not end at the factory gate. It ends only when the food it protects is gone.
Sajeed Abdul Lathief
General Manager, Precision Plastic Products Co. LLC
Visit Precision Plastic Products at Gulfood Manufacturing 2026, 3 to 5 November at Dubai World Trade Centre, to discuss the future of food packaging, product protection and sustainable manufacturing.
