Gold for Design for Recovery. Silver for Accessible & Inclusive Packaging Design. Bronze for Food Packaging Design.

All three went to the Honey Squeeze Pack at the 2026 PIDA Awards, announced on the evening of Tuesday 28 July at The Aviary in the Crown Complex, Melbourne.

There is a moment near the bottom of a jar of honey when most people give up. The spoon comes out clean. You tilt the jar, wait, tilt it again. Eventually the jar goes in the bin with precious honey still stuck around the sides.

We have been making caps and closures in Dandenong since 1995. What gets left in the jar is food waste, and it is the kind of thing we think about. How much gets left is usually decided by the closure.

The Honey Squeeze Pack was our answer to it. A clear rPET bottle that stands on its cap, so gravity keeps the honey waiting at the opening rather than somewhere up the back. A flip-top cap in rPP, in whatever colour a brand wants. And inside the cap, a dispensing valve in rPE that lets honey out in a controlled line and cuts it off cleanly when you stop squeezing.

The valve is the part nobody sees. It is also the part that took the longest.

Many honey squeeze packs use a silicone valve. Silicone works perfectly well. It also cannot be recycled, and when it travels through a recycling stream it travels as contamination the system tolerates rather than as material anyone gets back. It is an easy thing to leave alone. It is small, it is hidden, and no consumer is ever going to ask what it is made of.

We took it out. The valve in this pack is polyethylene, and it is recyclable, which is what lets us describe the whole pack as recyclable rather than most of the pack. Bottle, cap, valve, each with somewhere to go at the end. Any of the three can be specified with up to 100% post-consumer recycled content. We have completed an ARL PREP assessment on the unbranded pack, so producers have something to work from when they add their own labelling.

Then we squeezed a great many bottles of honey in our own factory, looking for leaks through repeated opening and closing, checking the dispensing stayed accurate, checking the pack would empty properly at the end.

On Tuesday evening, Adam Waldron, Bruce Langlands, Lachlan Holmes and Brendon Holmes went along to The Aviary for the announcement. We had entered two categories. We were listening for the pack’s name twice.

It came up three times.

The third was Silver for Accessible and Inclusive Packaging Design, a category we had not entered at all. We would like to say we designed the pack for accessibility. Not quite true. We designed it to dispense honey cleanly, and it turned out that a pack you can open, squeeze and close with one hand is a pack that suits somebody with a weak grip, or somebody holding a child, or anybody whose other hand is busy. The judges saw that before we had thought to say it, and we are grateful to them and to the AIP for looking that closely.

The same evening, Ralph Moyle was made a Life Member of the AIP, an honour the Institute has given eight times in 63 years. He stood at the podium, looked directly at Brendon, and said that we do the simple things well.

We would not have put it that well ourselves. A valve, a cap, a bottle that stands the wrong way up. Most of the work is in doing them properly.

One trophy and two plaques, for a part most people will never see. Printed along the bottom of both plaques is a line about exclusive entry to the WorldStar Global Packaging Awards. That happens next year.

Bruce spoke for the team on the night and is holding the trophy in most of the photographs below. Where the gold jacket came from is still a mystery. It turned up later in the evening.

An award is a judgement made once. The pack gets judged again every morning, by somebody who opens it one-handed and gets exactly as much honey as they wanted on their toast. They will never know what it won, and they do not need to.

The part we like best is the last squeeze. The one that still comes out clean.

Read PKN’s coverage of the Honey Squeeze Pack’s 2026 PIDA Awards:

• Gold: Sustainable Packaging Design, Design for Recovery
• Silver: Accessible & Inclusive Packaging Design
• Bronze: Food Packaging Design

Designed for the last squeeze

Honey Squeeze Pack brings recyclable materials, controlled one-handed dispensing and reliable performance together in a ready-to-brand packaging platform. Available in 400 g and 500 g formats, with flexible PCR content and cap colour options for your brand.