Iceland has switched its Christmas dinner packaging to offer customers the choice of a plastic free or reduced plastic packaging in a bid to progress its sustainability initiatives.

The frozen food retailer has replaced packaging on 18 Christmas products with recyclable paper wrap, which adds to its commitment of scrapping plastic packaging from own label products by the end of 2023.

Shoppers can pick up a starter, main course and dessert with minimal plastic packaging.

Iceland said its new products have 97 per cent less plastic packaging than in previous years.

“We’ve been working hard all year to develop alternative packaging solutions and I’m proud to be offering Iceland customers the choice of plastic free Christmas products,” Iceland managing director Richard Walker said.

“Christmas is a crucial time of year which sees retailers go head to head on product innovation, and we were keen to incorporate our sustainability efforts into this,” he said.

“We know that there is a significant appetite for reduced plastic packaging and that plastic consumption increases significantly at Christmas, so we were keen to take on the challenge and demonstrate to the industry and our consumers that it’s possible to have a sustainable Christmas.

“The development of the new range has involved exploring and testing hundreds of alternatives, before developing a series of new-to-market solutions which have either significantly reduced, or entirely removed, plastic from the packaging of our new Christmas range.”

Since Iceland pledged to remove plastic packaging from own label products by the end of 2023, it has scrapped more than 2100 tonnes of plastic from its own label packaging and has plans to further increase this figure in 2020.

The retailer has also announced that it will have remove all black plastic packaging from own label products by 2020.