The grease barrier in your sandwich wrap changed chemistry, and most operators were never told. Fluorinated treatments used to stop oil wicking through paper, and they worked so well that nobody thought much about wrappers at all. That chemistry has now left the US market, and PFAS-free grease barriers have taken its place.
They block grease a different way, fail a different way, and have to be specified differently. These replacements do hold up to hot, oily food. They simply behave differently, which is why some operators switch and notice nothing while others start seeing oil spots on delivery bags.
What Are PFAS-Free Grease Barriers?
A PFAS-free grease barrier is any treatment that stops oil from penetrating paper or molded fiber without using per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. In practice, it is one of four things: a water-based polymer coating applied at the mill or converter, a biopolymer film such as PLA, a densified paper that resists oil through tight fiber structure, or a non-fluorinated additive mixed into the pulp slurry before the product is formed.
PFAS, often called forever chemicals, are a large family of fluorinated compounds valued for repelling both oil and water. In packaging, they were applied as grease-proofing agents to paper and paperboard, and they persist in the environment, which sits at the core of the regulatory concern.
How FDA Action and State Bans Removed PFAS From Food Packaging?
In February 2024, the FDA announced that grease-proofing substances containing PFAS were no longer being sold into the US market for paper food packaging.
Manufacturers had committed in 2020 to withdraw products containing 6:2 fluorotelomer alcohol over three years, and in 2023 the remainder confirmed they had stopped selling their other PFAS grease-proofers. Long-chain compounds had already gone between 2011 and 2016.
In January 2025, the FDA determined that 35 food contact notifications for these substances are no longer effective.
State law runs on a separate track and is still moving. Fifteen states have enacted bans on intentionally added PFAS in food packaging, and twelve are already in force:
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In force now
New York, California, Washington, Vermont, Connecticut, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Hawaii, Oregon, Rhode Island and Maine.
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January 1, 2027
New Hampshire and New Mexico.
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January 12, 2028
New Jersey.
Maine's rule covers the formats in this article most directly. Since May 25, 2026, Maine DEP has prohibited nine categories of plant-fiber food packaging carrying intentionally added PFAS above an incidental presence: bags and sleeves, bowls, closed containers, flat serviceware, food boats, open-top containers, pizza boxes, plates, and wraps and liners.
We covered the operational side in our breakdown of Maine's May 2026 PFAS deadline.
Thresholds differ by state. Several use an intentionally added standard with no number attached. California screens at 100 parts per million of total organic fluorine, a lab measure that captures fluorine from any source rather than testing for individual PFAS compounds one at a time.
How PFAS-Free Barriers Block Grease Differently?
Fluorochemical treatments were applied at the paper mill by saturation, pushing chemistry into the fiber network itself. Every fiber became grease-repellent through surface energy, and no film sat on the surface. Because protection was spread through the whole sheet, minor process variation rarely broke anything.
PFAS-free coatings work the opposite way. They form a continuous, dense film that physically blocks oil from entering the substrate. The polymer does all the work, and it has to form a complete, defect-free layer across a porous surface that then survives folding, scoring, abrasion, heat, and moisture.
Variables that used to be secondary are now decisive: substrate porosity, coating weight, drying profile, and film flexibility. A wrap can pass a flat-sheet test and still fail at a fold line, because the coating fractured where the paper bent.
How PFAS-Free Barriers Perform on Wrappers and Liners
Wrappers and liners are the easier half of the problem, and most operators switch without noticing a change. Flat sheets have no score lines, so fold cracking matters far less than it does on assembled containers, and contact time is usually short.
A film-forming barrier on a wrap only has to stay continuous through a loose fold or two, rather than survive being scored and bent to a sharp radius on a carton former.
Our paper wraps include greaseproof options in several sizes, plus a PLA greaseproof wrap that uses a biopolymer film rather than a coating.
Paper liners do the same job inside pans, trays, and pizza boxes, adding a sacrificial barrier so the outer container does not carry the full load, which is often the cheapest way to fix a grease complaint without respecifying the container itself. Our comparison of foil wrap and wax paper covers the wider material trade-offs.
Where wraps do get tested is sustained heat and oil together. Hot food in a delivery bag stays warm and humid for twenty minutes or more, and that time at temperature is what pushes oil through a marginal barrier. Four conditions account for most of the complaints.
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Fried Food Straight From the Basket
Food straight from the fryer is the hottest and oiliest thing your wraps will ever hold. That makes it the condition to specify against, because anything that survives it will cope with the rest of your menu.
The reason comes down to the type of oil. Fried food carries loose oil on its surface, not oil locked inside the product, and loose oil is thin and quick to move while it is still hot. It spreads across the paper and works into any weak spot in the coating long before a cooler, drier item would.
Fries, wings and fried chicken sandwiches soak through a wrap sooner than anything else you serve, so test with those. Draining product for a few seconds before it touches the paper also makes a real difference, and it costs nothing to build into the line.
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Long Delivery Windows
Dwell time matters more than peak temperature. A wrap that looks perfect on a five-minute counter pickup can show oil at the fold after thirty minutes in a courier bag, because migration through a film barrier is cumulative rather than instant.
Test against your longest realistic delivery, not your average one. If you run a mix of dine-in, pickup and third-party delivery, the delivery orders set the specification and everything else inherits it.
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Condensation Inside a Closed Bag
Grease resistance and water resistance are separate properties, which surprises a lot of buyers. A coating tuned for oil can still wet out from condensation, because water attacks the structure differently. It softens and swells the fiber underneath, and once the substrate loses stiffness the coating sitting on top loses its support.
Condensation is the failure mode operators underestimate most, because it builds quietly rather than arriving with the food. Steam off a hot item collects on the paper for the length of the delivery, so the barrier is handling moisture from one side while oil works on it from the other. Ask for a water absorption figure, usually reported as a Cobb value, alongside whatever grease number the supplier quotes. One without the other tells you half the story.
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Tight Crimping and Twisting
Sharp creases concentrate stress on the coating. When paper folds, the outer face of the bend goes into tension, and a film that is stiffer than the sheet it sits on can microfracture along that line before anyone notices. Burrito tucks, twisted cones and tightly crimped sandwich folds are the usual culprits.
The fix is rarely a thicker coating. A more flexible grade, or a slightly looser wrapping technique at the line, usually solves it without giving up barrier performance elsewhere.
How PFAS-Free Barriers Perform on Molded Fiber Containers?
Molded fiber was the most PFAS-dependent category in foodservice, because raw pressed fiber has almost no natural grease resistance. It is also where most performance complaints land today.
Bowls, clamshells, and trays face harder conditions than a wrap. Food sits in them longer, the walls are curved so a coating has to cover complex geometry evenly, they hold liquid as well as oil, and they are often stacked warm, which traps steam against the surface.
Barrier in molded fiber is usually built into the pulp slurry rather than coated on afterward, a genuinely different engineering problem from coating a flat web.
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Hot oil in particular
Many specifications rate fiber products generously for hot liquid while setting a much lower ceiling for hot oil, because oil at temperature breaks fiber down faster than water does. Read the two ratings separately.
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Hold time under heat lamps
Any fiber product softens if plated food sits under a lamp for an extended period. Match the format to your real service window.
SupplyCaddy's fiber bowls are made from Eco-Bamboo and sugarcane, with matching PLA or fiber lids. For direct hot-grease contact, paper food boats and pizza boxes carry their own barrier demands, which we unpack in our guide to pizza box ventilation and grease resistance.
What the Kit Test Measures and What It Misses?
If you have seen a number between 1 and 12 on a spec sheet, that is a kit rating. The kit test, standardized as TAPPI T 559, applies a graded series of castor oil, toluene, and heptane solutions to a flat sheet. Each numbered solution is more aggressive than the last.
The sample sits for 15 seconds, excess is wiped away, and darkening counts as failure. The highest solution that does not darken the sheet becomes the rating.
The catch is that the test was built to measure fluorochemical repellency, which is surface-energy behavior. For a film-forming PFAS-free coating, a kit score mainly confirms the film is continuous and free of pinholes on a flat sheet at room temperature.
It says nothing about how the barrier holds at 170°F for twenty minutes, whether it survives scoring and folding, or whether the finished package leaks in a delivery bag.
That gap cuts both ways. A coating can pass kit and fail in service, or fail kit and still perform well against real hot grease. TAPPI has been working on a test better suited to film-based barriers. Until it arrives, treat kit as one input rather than the answer, and ask for results that mirror your operation:
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Hot oil hold time at your actual service temperature and dwell.
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Barrier retention tested on creased or scored samples, not flat sheets.
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Finished-package testing under delivery conditions.
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Cobb values if moisture and sauce are part of your menu.
Comparing the Main PFAS-Free Barrier Approaches
Four approaches cover most of what you will be quoted, and each has a different weak point:
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Water-based polymer coatings
A continuous film blocks oil at the surface, which suits wraps, liners, cartons and cups. Watch for fold cracking once coat weights climb.
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Biopolymer films such as PLA, PHA and starch
A plant-derived layer is coated or laminated onto the substrate, which works well for compostable programs, bowls and lids. Heat tolerance is generally lower than coated board.
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Densified greaseproof papers
Heavily refined fibers close the sheet structure mechanically, with no added barrier chemistry at all. Good for deli sheets, basket liners and bakery, weaker against sustained hot oil.
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Pulp-integrated additives
Non-fluorinated agents go into the slurry before forming, which is the standard route for molded fiber bowls, trays and clamshells. Hot oil ceilings often sit well below the hot water rating.
Your end-of-life target should drive this choice before chemistry does. Latex-type coatings generally separate cleanly from fiber during repulping, which supports a recycling route, while compostable targets point toward biopolymers, where the realistic barrier ceiling is lower than many buyers expect.
Our explainer on curbside recyclable versus compostable packaging is worth reading first.
Certification does real verification work here. Since January 1, 2020, BPI has required certified compostable products to contain no intentionally added fluorinated chemicals, test below 100 ppm total organic fluorine at an approved lab, and pass a formulation review.
Mistakes to Avoid When You Switch
Most PFAS-free programs that go wrong fail for one of five reasons, and all five are avoidable at the specification stage.
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Treating It as a Like-for-Like Swap
The old spec sheet described a different mechanism, so copying it across carries numbers that no longer measure the right thing. Fluorochemistry protected the sheet at fiber level, which meant substrate choice and converting method barely moved the result.
A surface film changes that, and coat weight, porosity, drying and fold geometry all become live variables. Rebuild the specification around the application rather than the previous product code. The question to answer is what your food does to packaging, not what the last barrier was rated at.
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Specifying a Kit Score and Stopping There
A kit number describes a flat, uncut sheet at room temperature for 15 seconds. Your carton is scored, folded, filled with hot food and left in a bag, none of which the test reproduces. Buyers who set a kit target and consider the job done often discover the gap only after a run of customer complaints.
Keep kit as a quality-control check on film continuity, which is what it is good for, and add post-converting and hot-contact results for anything you are approving at scale.
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Assuming PFAS-Free Means Compostable
PFAS-free is a chemistry exclusion. Compostable is a performance standard covering disintegration, biodegradation and ecotoxicity, verified against ASTM D6400 or D6868. One does not deliver the other, and plenty of PFAS-free coated board is designed for recycling and will never pass a composting standard.
The relationship only runs one way. BPI certification has included a fluorine screen since 2020, so a BPI mark tells you something about PFAS, while a PFAS-free claim on its own tells you nothing about compostability.
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Testing Only at Room Temperature
Barrier failures in foodservice are time-and-temperature failures. Hot food held around 170°F for twenty minutes or more is the realistic condition, and a sample that passes on a cool bench can still fail under it.
Run trials at your actual service temperature, for your actual holding window, with the food you actually sell. Chicken in a sauce behaves differently from fries, and a barrier qualified on one does not transfer to the other.
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Skipping the Documentation
Several states can ask for a certificate of compliance, and Washington and Maryland both place that duty on manufacturers. A verbal assurance from a distributor rep does not satisfy it, and neither does a line on a sales brochure.
Keep documentation per SKU, dated, naming the states it covers, and refresh it whenever a supplier changes a substrate or a coating. The point is to have the paperwork before anyone asks, not to go looking once they have.
Specifying PFAS-Free Packaging With SupplyCaddy
Switching barrier chemistry goes more smoothly when your supplier manufactures the product rather than reselling it. At SupplyCaddy, we are a Miami-headquartered foodservice packaging manufacturer with facilities across North America and Europe, producing wraps, liners, bowls, boats, boxes, bags, and cups for brands including Burger King, sweetgreen, Krispy Krunchy Chicken, Fuku, Guthrie’s Popeyes, Cinnabon, Hardee's, Tijuana Flats, H&H Bagels and Margaritaville, and distributed through partners such as Sysco, US Foods and Gordon Food Service.
Custom branding comes at no extra cost. Printed wraps, liners, and containers carry your artwork without a customization surcharge, so a barrier change does not have to mean packaging that looks like everyone else's.
Start by telling us what your food actually does to packaging: the oil load, the holding temperature, the delivery window, and the states you operate in. Browse our wraps and liners and food containers, or get in touch and we will work through the specification with you. Contact us at hello@supplycaddy.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are PFAS-free grease barriers as effective as PFAS?
For most foodservice applications, yes, though they get there differently. PFAS-free coatings block oil by forming a continuous film rather than repelling it at the fiber level. The hardest cases are sustained hot oil contact and tightly folded containers, which is where specification detail matters most.
Is PFAS banned in food packaging nationwide?
There is no single federal ban. The FDA confirmed in February 2024 that PFAS grease-proofing agents are no longer sold into the US market and declared 35 related food contact notifications ineffective in January 2025, which is a market withdrawal and an authorization action rather than a blanket prohibition. State bans operate separately, and fifteen states have enacted them.
What does a kit test score of 12 actually mean?
It means the sample resisted the most aggressive solution in the TAPPI T 559 series for 15 seconds without visible darkening. On a flat sheet at room temperature, that indicates a continuous film. It does not describe performance at service temperature, after folding, or over a realistic hold time.
Does PFAS-free automatically mean compostable or recyclable?
No. They are independent claims. Many PFAS-free coatings are designed for paper recycling and are not compostable, while compostable packaging typically relies on biopolymers such as PLA or PHA. Look for the specific certification rather than inferring one from the other.
Why do my PFAS-free containers leak at the corners?
Fold-crack failure is the most common cause. A coating optimized for flat-sheet grease resistance, usually through heavier coat weight, can fracture where the board is scored and bent. The fix is a more flexible film rather than a thicker one.
What is total organic fluorine and why does it appear in state laws?
Total organic fluorine is a lab measurement of all organically bound fluorine in a material, used as a screening proxy because testing for thousands of individual PFAS compounds is impractical. California and several certification programs use 100 ppm as the threshold.