Packaging technology and innovation can be of crucial strategic importance, as it can provide a competitive advantage in the food industry. This may be achieved in several different ways:
- by successfully meeting and fulfilling to the needs and wants of the end user
- opening up new supply channels and opportunities
- providing an increased quality of appearance; facilitating advances in cost-efficiency
- increasing profit margins
- developing and improving product/brand differentiation within the market
- improving the distribution of goods to customers
The continual challenge to brands and packaging companies is to provide cost effective performance that satisfies the demands of the user, with health and safety being crucial.
At the same time, they must balance and ideally minimise the environmental impact of products and the services required to deliver them. This challenge is driven by numerous internal and external pressures – chief among them, legislation and political demands. Often highlighted in the media, there is a desire to reduce the amount of packaging used and therefore packaging waste to be disposed of.
Packaging for consumer products, particularly fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), is an area where supply and demand is in constant flux due to the continued development of an international food market and the resultant, knock-on changes to consumer, distribution, legal and technological necessities.
Very broad external influences and pressures on packaging for fmcg may be summarised as follows:
- technological
- political/legal
- socio-cultural
- demographic
- ecological
- raw material availability
- economic
