Point Plastic's PET Trays: What EIC Accelerator Money Bought

A plastic meat or cheese tray that keeps oxygen out is usually not one plastic but two: a PET tray with a thin layer of EVOH, a barrier polymer, bonded into it. That layer is what keeps the food fresh, and it is also what stops the tray from being recycled with ordinary PET. Point Plastic, a small Italian maker of PET additives based near Frosinone, told the European Commission it had a fix: an additive mixed into a single layer of PET that blocks oxygen without EVOH. The EIC Accelerator pilot paid for it. In the October 2019 round the Commission selected Point Plastic's project FRA-PET, "Fully Recyclable A-PET", as a grant-only winner, and the list names no other company in the project.

The grant was €1,241,056.25 towards a €1,810,437.50 project that ran from 1 March 2020 to 30 June 2022, according to CORDIS. The company's final report says the formulation was optimised and tested successfully with prospective customers. What it does not show, and what nobody has announced since, is a food producer selling products in FRA-PET trays.

Where Point Plastic Stands Now

Point Plastic is active, profitable and growing. The company register data reported by aziende.it shows revenue of €10,736,975 and a net profit of €1,345,135 in 2022, a dip to €8,975,456 and €830,093 in 2023, and €10,845,140 in revenue with €1,268,448 of profit in 2024, with 13 employees and share capital of €10,000. Atoka puts revenue for 2025 at €12.0 million, up 11.1%, with 15 employees, and Informazione Aziende lists the company as active, with 2025 as the latest filed accounts and sales up 11% on 2024. Revenue before the EIC award is not public in these free sources, so how much of the growth followed the grant cannot be measured.

The company describes itself on its website as a supplier of "2500 tons/year" of functional additives to "80 clients over 4 continents", figures no third party confirms. In April 2026 it exhibited at Chinaplas in Shanghai, in the Italian pavilion. In November 2022, five months after FRA-PET ended, it appointed FutOrganic AG of Switzerland as an agent to promote its additives across Europe.

The sources give the company's address four ways. CORDIS lists Via Comunale Calzatora 92 in Anagni; the company's website gives a registered office at Via San Magni 242, Anagni, and its operational headquarters in Paliano; aziende.it and Atoka give Via San Magno 242, Anagni; and Informazione Aziende gives Via Zancati in Paliano. The founding date also differs: the company and its PETCORE Europe member profile say 2006, while aziende.it gives 1 January 2008.

The Technology: An Oxygen Barrier Inside the PET

The established way to make a PET tray resist oxygen is a passive barrier: a multilayer sheet with an EVOH layer. CORDIS states the consequence plainly. Recycling plants cannot sort PET/EVOH trays from pure PET trays, so all of them end up "discarded rather than recycled", about 1.1 million tonnes of PET trays a year in Europe, by the project's own count.

FRA-PET replaces the layer with a proprietary additive in a monolayer PET sheet. Point Plastic has not published the chemistry. Its earlier EU project, GREEN PACK, describes the approach: an "oxygen scavenger polyester-based additive" that reacts with oxygen as it passes through the tray wall, so the tray stays a single material. That project, funded under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme, ran from December 2013 to July 2019 under the Valencian plastics association AVEP, and Point Plastic received €506,898.38 as the consortium's PET specialist, according to CORDIS. Its final report says it proved the viability of fully recyclable PET trays. FRA-PET was the step meant to take that additive to market.

What FRA-PET Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

CORDIS lists three objectives: optimise the FRA-PET formulation, validate the trays in a pilot with two food manufacturers, and obtain the certifications needed to sell in Europe. The final report claims all three. It says several formulations were analysed and the best one selected, that industrial sheet and tray production was optimised, and that tests showed extended shelf life, "optimal Oxygen and CO2 barriers" and acceptable microbial counts. It says the data "have enabled to obtain the certifications required for market launch".

The report names no food manufacturer, no test partner and no certificate. The company's own project page still calls the project "Ongoing" and gives an end date of 28 February 2022, four months earlier than the 30 June 2022 that CORDIS records; the reason for the difference is not public. The only public deliverable on CORDIS is that project web page; no publications are listed.

1. Optimise the additive formulationDeliveredFinal formulation selected and industrial sheet and tray trials completed, per the CORDIS report; an "O2 and CO2 Barrier Additive" is on the company's product list.
2. Pilot with two food manufacturersUnverifiedThe report claims tests with "prospect customers" but names none.
3. Certifications for the EU marketUnverifiedClaimed in the report; no certificate or recyclability approval is named or published.
4. Market launch of FRA-PET traysNot achievedNo product under the FRA-PET name, no tray maker and no food brand using it has been announced by the company or anyone else.

On timing, the project closed on the date CORDIS records, 28 months after it started. On substance, the honest reading is that the EIC paid for the last development step of an additive that Point Plastic had already worked on since 2013, and that the step was completed on the company's own account. The commercial result, which was the point of an Accelerator grant, cannot be seen.

What Point Plastic Has Done Since the Award

Since FRA-PET, the company's public activity has centred on PET foam rather than food trays. It lists an Invitalia project from March 2021 to September 2022 to industrialise PET foam boards made from recycled raw material, with no amount given. In July 2026 it posted a project poster for PULSE, a regional project under the STEP Lazio call co-financed by the EU, to develop ultralight foamed PET for wind turbine blades: the poster gives eligible costs of €1,094,131.20 and a grant of €601,772.16. The project does not appear by name in the third ranking list of the call, published in July 2026, or in the first two; only the company's poster documents it.

Its patents point the same way. A European application, EP 3 775 008, filed in March 2019 with an Italian priority from March 2018 and naming Tonino and Luca Severini as inventors, covers a method to make foam from recycled PET. Patent analytics site GreyB records one opposition filed against it. No patent covering the FRA-PET barrier additive could be found in public searches.

Why Europe Should Care

The problem FRA-PET targets is now a legal one. The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, entered into force on 11 February 2025 and applies from 12 August 2026, with recyclability performance grades from 2030; "all packaging must be recyclable by 1 January 2030", as Baker McKenzie summarises it. Multilayer barrier trays that sorting plants cannot handle are the kind of packaging that rule puts at risk, so a working monolayer PET barrier would have a ready market among European tray makers.

That makes the silence after 2022 the central question. If the additive works as the report says, the regulation should be pulling it into the market; if it is being sold without the FRA-PET name, the company has not said so.

The Verdict

Point Plastic has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.