Greaseproof & Waxed Paper.

Greaseproof paper is the grade that wraps the world's fried food, deli sandwiches, butcher cuts, and bakery items. Stopping oil and grease from bleeding through a thin sheet of paper is a specific technical challenge — and one that, across 140 years of commercial papermaking, has been solved in three distinct ways. Three chemistries share the category name. Natural greaseproof is heavily beaten bleached chemical pulp, densified so thoroughly by refining and calendering that the pore network itself blocks oil migration — no coating required. Waxed paper is a base sheet saturated or coated with food-grade paraffin — the 1927 Reynolds Cut-Rite tradition, still the consumer-pantry default. Fluorochemical-treated greaseproof used perfluorinated alkyl compounds (PFAS) to give otherwise-permeable paper a molecular grease-repellent layer — the industrial-foodservice workhorse from the 1960s until its regulatory end in the mid-2020s WPI-g-000904. The post-2020 market is a rapidly shifting story: a global industry pivoting, under legal and brand pressure, from fluorochemistry toward fluorine-free alternatives — silicone coatings, PE laminations, and a growing family of bio-based barriers built from alginate, chitosan, starch, and PLA.

What it's used for

Fast-food wrappers are the largest industrial-foodservice use of greaseproof paper in the world. The McDonald's Quarter Pounder wrap, the Burger King Whopper wrap, the KFC chicken bucket top paper, the Wendy's burger square — these are greaseproof papers, usually 40–55 g/m², printed flexographically with a brand pattern on the outside and left clean on the food-contact side. Deli sandwich wraps at Subway and Jimmy John's and the countless independent delis behind them use a similar substrate. Butcher paper — for fresh meat cuts at the grocery meat counter — is a heavier greaseproof (typically 50–70 g/m²) and remains one of the largest single categories by tonnage WPI-g-000139.

Bakery food-contact is the other major vertical: pastry wraps, cookie liners, donut boxes, cupcake liners. Fish-and-chips wrap — the British high-street tradition, now almost always a dedicated greaseproof rather than the old newsprint — consumes a material share of UK greaseproof capacity. French patisserie uses greaseproof at the counter and as pâtisserie-box interleaving. Chocolate inner wraps (the thin sheet between the bar and the foil) are typically natural greaseproof. Microwave-popcorn bags were, for decades, the most high-profile PFAS-treated greaseproof application in the world — that chemistry is now almost entirely gone, replaced by PE-lined or bio-barrier designs.

French-fry cones, taco wraps, burrito sleeves, Chinese takeaway folds, pet-food liner, butter wrap (historically parchment, increasingly greaseproof), and the grease-barrier insert inside e-commerce boxes for greasy-food direct-to-consumer brands all run on the same substrate family. Anti-grease point bags WPI-g-000469 — the small flat or gusseted bags used for pastries at bakery counters — are a converted variant. If a food product contains oil and must be wrapped in paper, greaseproof is the grade that wraps it.

Origins and history

Greaseproof paper as a distinct commercial grade emerged in the late nineteenth century, driven by the industrialisation of food distribution. Butcher paper — the American meat-cutting tradition — used heavily internally-sized paper to contain blood and grease long enough to move a cut from counter to icebox. Italian delicatessens in New York and French charcuteries in Paris used lightly wax-impregnated paper for the same job. In Britain, newsprint wrapped fish-and-chips until health regulations in the 1980s ended the practice.

The first mass-market branded product in the category was Cut-Rite Wax Paper, introduced by Reynolds Metals in 1927. A bleached base sheet was passed through a bath of molten food-grade paraffin, cooled on chilled rolls, and wound into the 75-foot retail roll that every American kitchen pantry held for the next century. Cut-Rite is still on supermarket shelves today — a remarkably unchanged product across a hundred years.

Natural greaseproof — heavily beaten, supercalendered, chemically-untreated bleached kraft paper — developed in parallel as a European specialty, using the same principle as glassine WPI-g-000899 but at a thicker target weight. Scandinavian mills including the predecessors of modern Nordic Paper and Ahlstrom-Munksjö became the spiritual home of the grade.

The defining chapter of the twentieth century, though, was industrial fluorochemistry. 3M's Scotchban line — FC-805 and a family of related surface treatments based on perfluorinated alkyl fatty-acid compounds — became the dominant industrial-foodservice grease-resistance chemistry from the 1960s onward. Scotchban used C8 PFAS — perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), and related eight-carbon perfluoroalkyl compounds — that migrated through paper fibres and formed a molecular-scale grease-repellent surface at treatment levels of 0.5–2% by weight. The chemistry was extraordinarily effective: a 40 g/m² sheet that would leak oil in minutes as untreated stock became fully grease-proof with a fraction of a gram per square metre of Scotchban.

The PFAS crisis broke in the early 2000s. EPA studies linked PFOA and PFOS to cancer, immune suppression, developmental effects, and persistent environmental accumulation. The EPA 2010/2015 PFOA Stewardship Program committed 3M, DuPont, and six other manufacturers to eliminate PFOA from emissions and products by 2015; 3M voluntarily phased out PFOA-based Scotchban between 2000 and 2011. C6 PFAS substitutes — 6:2 fluorotelomer-based compounds — were introduced as "safer" replacements, but faced the same regulatory trajectory. In July 2020 the US FDA announced a voluntary phase-out of 6:2 FTOH-based food-contact compounds, completed February 2024 — effectively ending all fluorochemical treatment of food-contact paper in the US market. The EU has moved on a parallel track under REACH.

The fluorine-free revolution of 2015–2025 has pulled the industry back toward three alternatives: heavily-densified natural greaseproof (Nordic Paper's Greåker and Bäckhammar mills, Ahlstrom-Munksjö's Trévoux mill), bio-based barrier coatings, and silicone or PE films. McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, and Starbucks all committed publicly to PFAS-free food packaging between 2020 and 2024, completing a chemistry transition that a century of commercial food-contact paper-making had depended on.

How it's made

Three distinct production routes share the category name.

Natural greaseproof starts from bleached chemical pulp — typically a 60/40 hardwood/softwood blend, fully bleached to ISO brightness above 85%. The critical step is refining: the stock is beaten in disc refiners to an extreme Schopper-Riegler freeness of 75–90°SR. This level of fibrillation — a thick suspension of partially-collapsed fibres with huge surface area — is similar to glassine WPI-g-000899 but run at a thicker target weight. The highly-beaten stock is formed on a Fourdrinier, wet-pressed hard to collapse the fibre network, dried, and supercalendered between polished steel rolls at high line pressure to densify the sheet into a closed-pore structure. No chemical grease-resistance treatment is applied. Grease resistance emerges from the sheet's physical density alone — pores too small and too tortuous for oil capillary action.

Waxed paper uses a conventional bleached base sheet (typically 25–50 g/m²) — often a lightly-sized MG sulphite or kraft — that is run through a paraffin application station. Food-grade paraffin (melting point 50–65 °C, FDA 21 CFR 178.3710 compliant) is applied by saturation bath, nip roll, or curtain coater at 8–15 g/m² add-on weight, then chilled on cast steel rolls to solidify the wax into the sheet. The resulting product is water-proof and grease-proof but strictly temperature-limited — the paraffin softens above 50 °C and melts by 65 °C, which is why waxed paper cannot line a hot oven tray.

Fluorochemical-treated greaseproof (the historical industrial-foodservice route, now being phased out) applied PFAS compounds by size press or surface-treatment coater at 0.5–2% add-on over a conventional base sheet. The fluorochemical migrated through the fibre matrix and created a grease-repellent molecular surface. The base paper itself was unremarkable — the chemistry did the work.

Fluorine-free modern is a category rather than a single process. Silicone-coated greaseproof uses a thin cured-silicone layer (similar to release paper WPI-g-000873 but lighter) for oven-safe grease resistance. PE-coated greaseproof laminates a polyethylene film at 10–25 g/m² — highly effective but recycling-challenged. Bio-barrier variants apply alginate, chitosan, starch, or PLA coatings that mimic the grease-blocking effect of PFAS without the persistent-chemistry problem. Several European mills now ship natural mechanically-densified greaseproof as a default replacement for the old fluorochemical stock — the nineteenth-century solution returning as the twenty-first-century answer.

Specs that distinguish it

The numbers that matter when you're buying greaseproof paper in the post-PFAS market:

• Basis weight — 30–60 g/m²; fast-food wrappers typically 40–55, butcher paper 50–70, bakery interleaving 30–40. Measured to TAPPI T-220 / ISO 536.
• Grease resistance (TAPPI T-559 / 3M Kit Test) — the headline spec. A scored 1–12 scale using mixtures of castor oil, toluene, and heptane of increasing aggressiveness. Kit 7 is the commercial-grade minimum for foodservice wraps; kit 10–12 is expected from premium natural-greaseproof and silicone-coated stock. Any respectable modern greaseproof should clear kit 7 without PFAS.
• Water resistance (Cobb 60) — ISO 535. Target below 20 g/m² for a competent greaseproof; below 10 g/m² for waxed and PE-coated stock.
• Thermal stability — waxed paper rated to 50–65 °C (paraffin melt point); natural greaseproof and silicone-greaseproof rated to 180–220 °C (oven-safe). This is the single biggest functional distinction inside the family.
• Food-contact compliance — FDA 21 CFR 176.170 (aqueous and fatty-food compatibility) for US-market stock; EU Regulation 10/2011 plus framework 1935/2004 for European stock. Post-2024, US food-contact paper must carry documentation of zero PFAS content as the baseline — any legacy fluorochemical stock is non-compliant.
• Brightness — 80–88% ISO for bleached natural greaseproof; waxed paper typically lower because the wax impregnation darkens the sheet slightly.

Variants and family

The greaseproof family now splits cleanly along chemistry lines — a classification that itself reflects the last decade of regulatory change:

• Natural greaseproof — mechanically densified bleached chemical pulp, no chemical treatment. The fluorine-free default and the fastest-growing variant in the European and North American markets. Oven-safe.
• Waxed paper — paraffin-saturated or paraffin-coated base sheet. The 1927 Reynolds Cut-Rite tradition; consumer-pantry default. Not oven-safe.
• Silicone-coated greaseproof — premium oven-safe variant; similar chemistry to release paper WPI-g-000873 but at lighter silicone loadings. Approaches baking parchment in performance.
• PE-coated greaseproof — polyethylene-laminated; excellent moisture and grease barrier, challenged on recyclability and compostability.
• Bio-barrier greaseproof — alginate, chitosan, starch, or PLA coatings. The sustainable frontier; performance improving rapidly but not yet universal for high-temperature applications.
• C8 and C6 fluorochemical greaseproof — historical, now regulated out of food-contact use in the US (FDA 2024 final phase-out) and restricted under EU REACH.
• Colour greaseproof — pigmented natural greaseproof for branded foodservice wrap WPI-g-000139.

The obvious comparison is with baking parchment — both are food-contact papers, but the emphasis differs. Greaseproof paper is optimised first for grease barrier (TAPPI T-559 kit score) and second for heat resistance. Parchment is optimised first for non-stick release and second for very high oven temperature (220 °C+).

Buying notes

Three red flags worth catching in the 2026-and-beyond market:

PFAS-containing stock. Any fluorochemical-treated paper is non-compliant in US foodservice after the February 2024 FDA phase-out. Some legacy inventory and imports from less-regulated jurisdictions may still circulate. Ask for documentation of total organic fluorine (TOF) content — an independent lab test to EPA Method 1633 or an equivalent PIGE (proton-induced gamma-ray emission) screen. Any detectable fluorine above background (typically <10 µg/g) on a nominally fluorine-free stock is a red flag. Fast-food brand owners now universally audit this.

Waxed-paper shelf-life and hot-transfer failure. Paraffin wax softens at 50 °C and migrates slowly at room temperature over months. Old waxed paper becomes tacky, bleeds wax through adjacent cartons, and sticks to its own wound reel. Specify stock age and rotate inventory. Never use waxed paper for food at serving temperature above 50 °C — it will bleed wax into hot food.

Bio-barrier coating performance inconsistency. Early alginate and chitosan coatings had inconsistent grease resistance at elevated temperature — a kit-12 result at 20 °C dropping to kit-5 at 80 °C on the same sheet. The chemistry has improved dramatically since 2022 but specification should include a hot-surface grease test (modified TAPPI T-559 at 60 °C) for high-temperature applications.

FDA or EU food-contact documentation is essential for any stock in the foodservice supply chain. FSC Mix 70 is the realistic minimum for sustainability; FSC 100% is available from Nordic and Finnish mills at a modest premium. Recycled content is increasingly specified but difficult to combine with the extreme refining that natural greaseproof requires — the mechanical demands of 85°SR beating are harsh on short recycled fibres.

Related reading

• Baking parchment paper — the food-contact cousin optimised for oven temperature and non-stick release rather than grease barrier.
• Glassine paper — the thinner, more translucent natural-greaseproof sibling; same mechanical-densification chemistry.
• Release paper — the silicone-coated cousin; shares coating chemistry with silicone-greaseproof variants.
• PFAS phase-out in food packaging — the regulatory trajectory that has reshaped the greaseproof paper industry between 2000 and 2024.
• GSM — how basis weight is defined and measured.

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