The Legal Side

Another sustainability-related pillar of yours was food waste prevention. What do you see happening there?

Angela Morgan from Aptar was here, talking about active packaging and food waste prevention. And it’s such a big thing now—I’m sure there are more active packaging products out there than we are aware of because it’s one of those that I call an invisible technology.

You don’t know whether your plastic film on your snack wrapper has had a treatment on it unless you’re told. Provided again we can make the retailers understand both the consumer benefit and the cost benefit, I think that we’ll see a lot more active and monitoring devices on packs at item level, rather than at batch level. On your supermarket shelves, you might see some of these color changing labels getting going, stuff like that, because food prices are going through the roof. And people are becoming a lot more cost conscious and therefore, that should translate into better management of the food that you buy.

That’s where you get into nifty areas like dynamic pricing, correct?

There are a few dynamic pricing models out there. I’m not going so far as to say that everyone’s going to end up with an intelligent refrigerator. There are fridges like that already that will tell you when to use your products, but they’re probably quite expensive. And people don’t just change fridges every day because there’s a new feature. But in stores you’ll see active and compliance packaging. There was a lot of talk, if you recall, of GS1 rolling out coding and traceability standards, and there’s better promotion of the bene ts of it now. That’s thanks to GS1 being a world network, and there’s a lot of people working with them now. A lot of drive comes from regulation, and I can only see regulation getting heavier rather than lighter in the next few years. I’m not talking about sustainable packaging. I’m talking about food regulation and food safety, and active and intelligent packaging can help there. So, those things are good for our industry.

Coming out of this latest AIPIA World Congress, where are you seeing active and intelligent packaging gaining the most traction?

In the early days, we thought that the things that would really excite the brands would be anti-counterfeiting and traceability, market diversion, avoidance, and all that. Actually, the thing that they really bit on was consumer engagement. It’s making a much closer relationship with their clients, with their consumers. And I don’t see that going away at all. Marks & Spencer had to cancel, but their contribution to the Congress was roughly going to be about consumer engagement aspects of active and intelligent packaging. And that was the thing that they as a retailer were interested in; in engaging their consumers more closely. We sort of went to the background elements of smart packaging a bit during COVID thing because other things, like safety, security, and traceability seemed to become more the focus. But now you’re getting a bit more relaxed again. We’re going to get more consumer engagement features, I think. —Matt Reynolds