I am going to moan about wet cat food packaging in small sachets in the UK. The problem may not exist in other countries. Some wet cat food manufacturers should be ashamed of themselves. They create packaging for small sachets of cat food such as you see in the photograph which cannot be opened without some spillage or without fiddling around with scissors unless you use force which inevitably leads to some of the contents being splashed over the surrounding area.

I’ll describe the problem in more detail. These are small tear open sachets. They more or less tear open adequately (but they can be ‘sticky’) up to the point where they are about to be fully torn off. That’s where it stops and you can’t tear the top off completely. This must be due to the packaging material which appears to be too elastic.
And there appears to be some sort of barrier when you get to the end of tearing the top off which prevents it going any further. And therefore, as you see in the photograph, you are left with this irritating flap of packaging which gets in the way of releasing the product into a bowl.
Of course, the top can be torn off if you apply enough pressure but if you do that some of the liquid content splashes out onto the countertop or floor. This is something you clearly want to avoid because you’re making more work for yourself.
What I do – if I have the patience – is to use a pair of scissors to cut the top off and then I use a knife to scrape out the contents. But that means cleaning the scissors and the knife; more fiddle and more bother.
And this is another complaint of mine. Invariably if you squeeze the contents out you leave about 3%-5% inside the sachet which goes to waste which is why I sometimes use a knife. Do the manufacturers rely on this to make more profit? If every cat owner throws away 5% of their purchase even before it gets into the bowl, they have to buy more food and more profit for the manufacturers.
Not all sachets are difficult to tear off like this. There are some manufacturers who do a good job and you can tear them off completely in one go without much force and without any spillage. So why can’t the other manufacturers do the same thing? Are they being careless and sloppy or is it because they simply don’t have the ability to manufacture wet food packaging which can be used easily and conveniently?
Below are some more articles on cat food packaging.
I agree with you totally on this subject. It is extremely difficult to get the last spoonful out of these pouches/sachets, so they are wasteful. I have another objection to them that you didn’t mention. They are lined with a thin plastic film and the wet food they contain is up against this film for however many months it take for these pouches/sachets to make it from the factory to being opened by the consumers in their homes and eaten by their cat or cats. The purchaser has no idea how long these pouches of cat food have been sitting on shelves at the factory, wholesaler, and retailer. It seems very likely to me that all that time harmful chemicals are likely to be leaching from that plastic film into the wet cat food it is in contact with. That is why I don’t buy wet cat food in pouches/sachets anymore, I prefer cans for that reason. Maybe chemicals leach from steel or aluminum cans also, but to me it seems less likely to be harmful compared with plastic film. But one of the problems with any product, but especially pet food, is that the consumer is kept in the dark about the safety of what they buy.