2020 Perspectives on 2030 Packaging

• Channel-specific designs. Before the appearance of big box, club, or warehouse stores, consumers had one retail packaging design to pick from, no matter what kind of retail store they shopped in. Big box retailers introduced the concept of outlet-specific packaging (mainly larger-than-traditional primary containers, and bundles of primary packages) to lug home. Then, e-commerce burst on the scene (thank you, Amazon) and with it package design optimized for colorful on-screen introductions followed in a day or two by no-charge, plain brown, “frustration-free” shipping boxes or padded envelopes.

By 2030, with fewer brick-and-mortar outlets around, the “smiling arrow” is likely to be emblazoned on three out of four home-delivered or BOPIS (Buy Online, Pickup in Store) packages, which gives new meaning to the term “pickup” truck.

• Heightened sustainability. This trend has been picking up steam for some time. And it isn’t going to stop any time soon. Once the largest CPG companies (P&G, Nestlé, Pepsi, Coke, Unilever, et al) amped up their recycling/recycled-content goals, machinery and materials suppliers moved to help them turn plans into accomplishments. And others followed suit. “Keep it simple but effective” could be the new mantra of Cadbury’s paper barrier flow wrap, now being tested in New Zealand. If tests of the wrap, which contains no laminates, foil, or plastics, are successful, Mondele-z International (Cadbury’s parent) could move the paper wrap to other confections.

Every week we see more sustainable packaging goals set. Pepsi’s fast-food arm, Taco Bell, is climbing further aboard the packaging sustainability train by pledging to “make all of its consumer-facing packaging recyclable, compostable, or reusable worldwide by 2025.”

• More plastic closures/fewer metal ones. We estimate the global plastic cap/closure market will surpass 3 trillion units by 2030, growing at a CAGR of about 4.5%. Meanwhile, the metal closure market, expanding at a CAGR of about 1.5%, will grow to fewer than 2 billion by 2030.

• Designs optimized for end-of-life disposition. Developing and identifying compostable food packaging, separating it from food waste and accepting efficient combustion for energy generation as an acceptable packaging waste reduction strategy, should help raise the 2030 percentage of packaging waste transformed back into product-producing resources.

• Increasingly robust structures. E-commerce is a largely single-item shipping environment that assaults products more severely than those unitized in the protective embrace of a palletized load of similar packages. Add free returns to the equation and more robust shipping containers are an e-commerce must. By 2030 we expect most consumer products—many of them in returnable/reusable secondary packages like those that mid-20th century moms mailed laundry to their college kids in—to be delivered via GPS-guided trucks and robot-driven carts.

Whether any of these packaging visions come to pass, we are certain that packagers and their packaging technology vender/partners will continue to find efficient, sustainable ways to identify, protect, and distribute products to their consumer and industrial customers.

Ben Miyares, Packaging Sherpa, is a packaging market and technology analyst and is president of The Packaging Management Institute, Inc. He can be reached at [email protected].