diff --git a/Dockerfile b/Dockerfile
index f1b97bc3..6a3e42ff 100644
--- a/Dockerfile
+++ b/Dockerfile
@@ -13,10 +13,6 @@ RUN apt-get update \
 
 COPY requirements.txt .
 RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
-ENV NLTK_DATA=/app/nltk_data
-
-# Download standard NLTK data, to prevent unstructured from downloading packages at runtime
-RUN python -c "import nltk, sys; packages = ('punkt_tab', 'averaged_perceptron_tagger', 'averaged_perceptron_tagger_eng'); sys.exit(0 if all(nltk.download(package, download_dir='/app/nltk_data') for package in packages) else 1)"
 
 # Disable Unstructured analytics
 ENV SCARF_NO_ANALYTICS=true
diff --git a/Dockerfile.lite b/Dockerfile.lite
index 229d3179..f0e2f40a 100644
--- a/Dockerfile.lite
+++ b/Dockerfile.lite
@@ -13,10 +13,6 @@ RUN apt-get update \
 
 COPY requirements.lite.txt .
 RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.lite.txt
-ENV NLTK_DATA=/app/nltk_data
-
-# Download standard NLTK data, to prevent unstructured from downloading packages at runtime
-RUN python -c "import nltk, sys; packages = ('punkt_tab', 'averaged_perceptron_tagger', 'averaged_perceptron_tagger_eng'); sys.exit(0 if all(nltk.download(package, download_dir='/app/nltk_data') for package in packages) else 1)"
 
 # Disable Unstructured analytics
 ENV SCARF_NO_ANALYTICS=true