In this article
You swapped the plastic straws for paper ones. Greener, you thought — and so did practically every venue in Europe. In 2023 the University of Antwerp tested straws from brands on the Belgian market and found PFAS in the majority of the paper ones, more often than in the plastic ones. That single finding moves the question: 'made of paper' and 'compostable' say nothing on their own about PFAS.
The switch was genuinely well meant. Single-use plastic was under fire, guests were asking for it, and paper looks like the decent answer. Almost nobody asked what was keeping the paper watertight — because a straw made of bare paper collapses before your glass is half empty. So something is on it. And in a share of the brands tested, that something turned out to belong to the PFAS family.
Be honest about what that study does and does not say. It tested a limited number of brands in one market, and it measured detection: finding traces is not the same as showing that one straw makes anybody ill. What it does puncture is the assumption the whole takeaway shelf rests on — that paper or plant-based packaging is chemically clean by definition. That assumption is wrong, and that is an operational fact rather than a scare story.
The straw is also the smallest example. The same property — holding back grease and water with no visible plastic layer — is exactly what you expect from a fibre bowl that keeps a curry dry for half an hour, from a pizza box that does not go soggy, and from a bag with a croissant in it. Where that property comes from is rarely printed on the box.
What follows: what PFAS is in plain language, where the rules stand today (and, more importantly, where they do not yet), which five formats it hides in on your own shelf, how to find out from your own supplier whether it concerns you, and a calculator that shows what switching costs using your volumes and your prices. This is not legal advice.
Why this lands on your desk now
Because it does not arrive with an inspector, it arrives with your supplier. The moment a wholesaler adjusts its range — because a manufacturer drops a coating, or because a market it also supplies gets stricter — the assortment changes and the price changes. You notice it on the invoice, not in a letter. Anyone who still has to work out what they are actually buying at that point is negotiating from a poor position.
Because some countries did not wait. Denmark restricted PFAS in paper and board food-contact materials back in July 2020, the first EU country to do so. France widens restrictions on food-contact packaging in 2026 through its AGEC anti-waste law. At EU level, a REACH restriction proposal submitted by five member states sits with ECHA's committees. That last one is a live file with no fixed end date — treat it as a direction of travel, not a deadline.
And because there is a claims side to this that has nothing to do with chemistry. Much of this packaging carries 'compostable', 'plastic-free' or a little leaf. If a box with that printing turns out to be treated after all, that is precisely the sort of environmental claim regulators across Europe are now looking at more closely. You did not print the text, but you do hand it over with your food inside it.
What you need to know, in 7 steps
No alarm and no chemistry lesson: this is what an operator needs in order to have one conversation with their supplier and then make a decision.
1. What PFAS actually is, in one paragraph
PFAS is not a substance but a family of thousands of man-made ones, built around a carbon-fluorine bond that barely occurs in nature. That bond is exceptionally strong: it hardly breaks down in the environment at all. Hence the nickname that has stuck everywhere — 'forever chemicals'.
That same durability is why industry likes them. PFAS repels water and grease at the same time, holds up under heat, and you only need a thin layer of it. For a raincoat, a firefighting foam or a non-stick pan that is a desirable property. For something that wraps a sandwich once and then goes into the paper recycling or onto a compost heap, the balance is different — the food is gone within the hour, the substance stays.
2. Why it is in food packaging at all
Because paper and moulded fibre let everything through on their own. Put a greasy burger in bare board and within ten minutes you have a soaked box and greasy hands. The classic answer was a plastic film or a PE coating — visible, tangible, and commercially awkward these days because both guests and legislators want to see plastic disappear.
A fluorine treatment does the same job without you seeing it. The paper still feels like paper, may be called 'plastic-free', and in many cases even earns a compostability certificate. That is not your supplier deceiving you: for years it was the technically tidy way to meet the demand for plastic-free.
The consequence, though, is that the property you pick a pack for — 'this does not leak through' — is precisely the property that raises the question. The more impressively grease-resistant an apparently untreated paper performs, the more relevant the question of how it manages it.
3. Where the rules stand today — and where they do not
This is the part most articles online get too confident about, so, explicitly: there is at present no PFAS cut-off date for food packaging that applies across all 24 EU markets at once. What there is, is a pattern of countries moving ahead and an EU file under consideration.
Denmark became the first member state to restrict PFAS in paper and board food-contact material, in July 2020. France widens its restrictions on food-contact packaging in 2026 through its AGEC anti-waste law. And five member states jointly submitted a REACH restriction proposal covering the whole PFAS group; that sits with ECHA's scientific committees and has no fixed date.
So read the timeline below as a direction rather than a diary. The practical conclusion is the same whichever date ends up applying where: your supplier tunes its range to the strictest market it sells into, and that range is your range too.
What has already happened, in order. The last step deliberately has no date: it is not settled yet.
None of these steps applies automatically in your market. They show which way this is moving and why your supplier is already adjusting its range — for your own country, always check what is actually in force.
4. Where it hides in your own store cupboard
Not everything made of paper is suspect. The likelihood depends on what the format has to do: the longer a pack has to hold back grease and moisture with no visible layer, the greater the chance something has been applied. A napkin carries little risk; a fibre bowl holding sauce for half an hour is a different story.
Open the five formats below — the ones sitting on the shelf in an average takeaway operation. Each one says how likely a treatment is and what you can concretely check.
Open a format. For each: how likely a treatment is, and what you can concretely check.
Likelihood is not a finding. This assessment follows from what the format has to do technically — the longer grease and moisture have to be held back with no visible layer, the greater the chance of a treatment. Only the manufacturer's declaration settles it for a specific article.
5. How to find out whether it concerns you
There is one question that works, and you put it in writing: ask your supplier, per article number, for a declaration that no PFAS or fluorinated compounds have been added to the product, together with the food-contact declaration of compliance it should hold anyway. In writing, because a verbal 'no, that's just paper' is not a record and does not travel on to your own customer.
A good supplier delivers that within a week, or says honestly that it has to request it from the manufacturer. A supplier who waves the question away or dodges it has effectively given you your answer — and quite apart from PFAS, that is useful information about how they handle documentation.
Alongside that there is one rule-of-thumb signal you can see on the shelf: a pack that is markedly grease- and water-resistant without any glossy layer you can see or feel is doing something bare paper cannot. That is a reason to ask, and nothing more. It is not a test and it proves nothing — the real answer comes from a laboratory or from the manufacturer's file, not from a hunch.
6. Roughly what a switch costs
PFAS-free alternatives already exist: moulded fibre with a water-based or biopolymer barrier, paper with a thin PE or PLA layer, or simply a different format that sidesteps the problem. They are available, they work, and they usually cost a little more per unit than the treated version — the order of magnitude suppliers tend to quote sits somewhere between 5% and 30%, depending heavily on format and volume.
Treat that band as a question for your own supplier, not as a figure from us. It says nothing about your contract, your purchase volume or your region, and that is exactly why it appears below as an adjustable percentage rather than as a claim. The real number is in the quote you are about to request.
What you can do in the meantime is work out the size of the thing. A percentage on your packaging budget sounds different from the same amount per week, and it is that second figure people actually decide on.
7. 'Compostable' and 'plastic-free' are not synonyms for PFAS-free
This is the trap most venues fall into, and it is an understandable one. The three labels answer three different questions: compostable says how the material breaks down, plastic-free says there is no polymer film on it, and PFAS-free says no fluorinated compound was added. A pack can earn the first two and fail the third.
In fact the very wish to be plastic-free is what kept the fluorine treatment attractive for years, because it was the only way to make a paper product watertight without laying plastic on it. The green choice and the chemical choice pulled apart at exactly that point.
In practice that means one thing: do not accept any logo as an answer to the PFAS question. If you want to know, it is in the manufacturer's declaration and nowhere else. For the other half of your packaging file — which symbols do mean something and which fees you owe — we have a separate guide to packaging rules in hospitality.
What switching costs you — run it on your own numbers
Enter your own weekly volumes and your own unit prices. The calculator does nothing but multiply: no average restaurant, no assumption about your supplier, only your figures.
The uplift percentage is a scenario you set. Put your supplier's margin in as soon as you have it; until then the starting value is no more than a plausible point of departure.
Work it out: what PFAS-free packaging costs you per year
Your volumes, your unit prices, your scenario for the extra cost.
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This counts the purchase price of the packaging only. No labour, no write-off on your current stock, no change to your menu prices and no effect on your waste bill. It is an order of magnitude to take to your supplier, not a budget.
That weekly figure is usually the number that settles the argument. An annual total sounds like an investment decision; the same amount per week sits next to what you spend on a single service day's milk, and then the conversation is suddenly about something else.
And it is not all or nothing. The formats where the risk is highest — the fibre bowls, the grease-proof boxes — are also the formats where it costs most per unit. Anyone wanting to phase it starts there and leaves the napkins alone.
What to do about it this month
Three things, and all three cost you one email or a quarter of an hour in the store cupboard.
1. Ask for it in writing
- Email your packaging supplier one list of the article numbers you actually buy, and ask per number for a declaration that no PFAS or fluorinated compounds have been added.
- Ask for the food-contact declaration of compliance in the same email. It should exist anyway, and the two documents belong together.
- File the answers with your supplier records rather than in your inbox. If somebody asks in a year's time, you want to find it in thirty seconds.
2. Look at your shelf once with different eyes
- Walk the five formats above and note which you actually use and in what quantities — you need that list for the previous step anyway.
- Put the formats where grease and moisture sit longest at the top. Those are your fibre bowls and your grease-proof boxes, and that is where you would begin.
- Note what claims are printed on them while you are there. 'Compostable' or 'plastic-free' on a treated product is a second conversation, quite apart from the chemistry.
3. Put a number beside it before you decide
- Fill in the calculator above with your real volumes, so you walk into the quote with an amount rather than a feeling.
- Ask for two quotes: one on your current formats and one where the supplier proposes a PFAS-free alternative itself. The difference is your real percentage.
- Only then decide whether to switch in one go or tackle the two heaviest formats first. Both are defensible; deciding nothing is not.
In short
The paper straw is not the problem — it is the clue. It showed that the assumption a whole sector picked its packaging on, 'paper, therefore clean', does not hold by itself. The same question applies to the bowl, the box and the bag, and there it covers far more units.
The regulation is real but uneven: Denmark since 2020, France widening in 2026, and an EU-wide proposal still under consideration. There is no date that applies everywhere, and anybody telling you otherwise is guessing. What does apply everywhere is that your supplier pulls its range towards the strictest market it operates in.
So do the boring thing: request the declaration, per article number, in writing. Put an amount beside it using your own volumes. Then this stops being a file and becomes a decision worth a few hundred euro a year — and you would rather take it now than on the day your wholesaler takes it for you.