The New Year is here, and in the world of Packaging and The Supply Chain, some trends this year have been palpable both in the news and, more personally, in the work we’ve carried out for our various clients.

2019 – What We Saw

iDi Pac entered 2019 with the excitement of impending innovation on the horizon. As the palpable desire of the previous year had made clear to us, sustainability, simplicity and ‘eco-premium’ packaging design were the ‘tropical’ trend that quickly grew to into a category 3 storm shift in the packaging zeitgeist.
The work we saw, and less personally – the news that broke throughout this year became a real manifestation of this thirst for change and improvements, from which here are just a few major points and highlights that struck a chord with us.

Surge in Sustainability/Biodegradability in Almost All Our Work

It really shouldn’t have come a surprise to us at all, given the building momentum and public demand towards this in the social and mainstream media, the BBC’s own 2019 ‘War on Plastic’ documentary struck while the iron was already white-hot on this issue.
It seems that many purveyors of packaging came to us to do the same, where we were able to offer for clients a huge array of ever more affordable sustainable packaging solutions; biodegradable foams, bio plastics through to simple yet powerful ‘light-weighting’ solutions to reduce the carbon footprints of existing packs. Businesses across the spectrum seemed eager to pursue these eco-friendly alternatives to materials and pack design and to adopt a ‘performance based’ optimisation process championed by ourselves.

PLA Biodegradable Plastic Packaging Quickly Moving from Theory to Application

As the mounting popularity of low-carb diets have begun taking the world by storm, it seems there’s a new incredibly practical use for all those delicious starchy carbs people are doing their best to avoid eating; namely, turning them into biodegradable plastics. From home-compostable bags to biodegradable water bottles; as proven solutions get closer and closer to the senses, the amount of petroleum-plastic sitting around the market that could be readily swapped for bioplastics is beginning to show up as a sore and throbbing thumb. One has to hope however that the coordinated waste stream approach will support this important environmental material initiative.

Smart Packaging; Desirability Rising with Increased Affordability

Technology continues to attempt to drag packaging into the 21st century, whether it likes it or not. Streamlined smart and intelligent solutions being delivered to address a wide array of problems and the needs of both customers and brands.
Everything from basic cloud-based track and trace to similarly cloud-based information rendition that doesn’t care one iota about physical pack dimensions or font-size tweaking, providing a welcome sigh of relief to a growing real-estate issue that is sure to continue growing as legislation demands more and more information to be rendered to consumers. Solutions are plentiful and excitingly applicable to almost anything. It is really no wonder we saw a rise in work and enquiries connected to this important technology sector.

Track and Trace Becoming Mainstream

Track and trace in Pharma has become ubiquitous. Delivering security and more latterly a ‘contained in the supply chain’ solution to ensure your supply chain strategy is functioning like the well-oiled machine it should be. Perhaps as a front-facing commercial and consumer-driven boon to give your packaging and product another dimension of reliability and trust. Overall, it has become a more mainstream desire from producers and brands, to the point that even start-ups/SMEs are looking at it as standard, and bespoke development. The solutions offered by us, for example, offer a pragmatic and cost-effective introduction and have proved to be a welcome alternative to big-budget all-singing, all dancing over-delivering solutions. Sometimes you just want a coffee, not a trendy alchemists potion disguised as coffee.

As I write this, news recently published by phys.org describing that ‘microplastics [are] 1 million times more abundant in the ocean than previously thought’ – making it clear this dynamic shift in every industries change in their approach to packaging, from the physical materials themselves, to the technological assurances regarding their lifespan is far from over. With that in mind, what does 2020 hold?

2020 – What Could Be Coming

More Bespoke Company-Owned Apps, API’s & Cloud-Based Smart Solutions

Not long ago, it was unthinkable that every company might have their own website. Websites were, during the dawn of the world-wide web, the landscape of universities and multi-national corporations big enough to have them. As we know now, this didn’t stay the case for long. Websites and analytics are the absolute minimum entry standard for everyone from mega-corporations to start-ups and self-employed tradesmen, an email address that looks like a bedroom operation will be treated exactly the same.

It seems fitting then that 2020 and indeed future years will see an acceleration in the growth of companies of all sizes offering intelligent cloud-based solutions that drive their smart-packaging or track and tracing without having to rely on the subscriptions and fealty to developers of the existing ‘everybody on our platform’ solutions. Solutions that can be developed by companies like ourselves, bespoke but ultimately owned and even hosted on URL’s of the companies. These companies are fostering growth in consumer loyalty and favour without paying any pipers.

Paper and Bioplastic in Unconventional Places

As mentioned previously, bio/eco materials are taking off in a big way, and seeing solutions be executed and integrated so efficiently, you quickly start to realise just how much else in the way of materials remain unchanged and unchanging.
Simply looking around my desk as I write this, I can see about 40 or so plastic items that ‘technically’ wouldn’t be categorised as ‘single use’, but will absolutely be thrown away eventually, and are unlikely to be properly recycled.

Obscure plastics; pens, usb sticks, every individual key on my keyboard, even the secondary casing around my phone, being charged on a wireless, plastic stand. As a packaging and supply chain consultancy, it’s clear to us the possibilities in supplying alternative formats and materials for these ‘technically not single use’ items that will nevertheless likely end up somewhere less than the desirable location.

E-Commerce Innovation

As the e-commerce sector thrives, standing out from the competitor offer at the point of unboxing, not just on the web-page, becomes key – I have to say, on a personal level, that a small handful of brands on Amazon have gained my loyalty simply because of the unexpected but very welcome messages and ‘little details’ that are added to their otherwise fairly standardised packaging e-commerce based solutions.

The lesson here is that the traditional thinking, packaging that worked for store shelves, aimed at standing out loud and proud in the retail crowd, doesn’t really work when you’re being shipped, often alone, in a brown box containing air and plastic air-cushions. How you pack, how to make it stand out becomes key; how special you can make the recipient feel, and then you can (positively!) shock them. Cute, simple and memorable designs or presents within the pack can be the difference between an online shopper buying once or on multiple occasions. An ‘anything will do’ mentality, needs to be converted to positively remembering your brand and products, and the consumer actively thinking ‘no, I want them specifically’.

Blurring the Lines Between Physical/Traditional Packaging and Digital

It is our belief here at iDi Pac that the technology ‘traditionally’ thought of as the print-based label will soon find itself becoming the tip of a progressively disclosed information-iceberg, underpinned by simple, but powerful cloud technology, with which brand-to-customer communication, feedback operations and trust-based loyalty can grow in ways as unprecedented as our present-day tech-driven market and productivity boom.

This future can be a world where every product and every piece of packaging knows how it should be disposed of, where it can be disposed of, it can know your area, know its consumers personally, it can identify products complimentary to it within the household and inform people of that. All mediated and empowered by the physical computing technology everyone carries with them at all times, or exists permanently within the home as phones, desktop computers, home servers and smart assistants.

The app based approach delivered via smart connectivity; scans, NFC and so forth delivering useful, effective, well formatted information; in the Pharma e-PIL space, protecting those with food intolerances and for busy folks looking for better information, in fact anybody that needs it! Cloud based computing we see as one of the major tenets of future product offers. Packaging is a communication device and the key to the Cloud via the ubiquitous electronic devices so many of us use today.