Four Key Packaging Trends to Focus on in 2024

Esko hosted a webinar panel to review the key findings of its “2024 Packaging Trends” research, which revealed that brands, print service providers, printers, and converters continue to view four key areas as priorities for packaging production this year.

Cost Savings

The first topic the panel discussed was reducing costs, which is a challenge when you have to balance demands for quality and already “razor-thin” margins, according to Susie Stitzel, director of product management at Esko.

However, automation may be a way to balance quality and costs.

“By implementing automation, especially for those tasks that are sort of repetitive, routine, and things like that, we increase our consistency and we reduce our costs,” Stitzel said.

Utilizing digital printing may also help with cutting costs, said Richard Deroo, product manager for structural design at Esko.

“With digital print, it's all about shorter cycle times, quicker time-to-market,” Deroo said. “So, if you have collaborative design platforms, as well as 3D tools for 3D prototyping, for example — that allows customers to rapidly iterate that design cycle. That helps them meet that time-to-market demand, but it is a cost savings as well because they're saving on time, as well as resources.”

Sustainability

Also key for 2024 is the demand for sustainability. In fact, more than 75% of survey respondents selected either “extremely important” or “somewhat important” when asked how important the sustainability of their company’s packaging would be in 2024.

“Sustainability is not so much a trend, it is nowadays an absolute necessity for us in the packaging industry to respond to that demand of consumers to produce more sustainable products,” said Jan De Roeck, marketing director of industry relations and strategy at Esko, who moderated the panel.

However, looking at sustainability practices is not a single-sided issue, advised Jijo Dominic, vice president of product management at Esko.

“We produce waste to reduce waste,” he said. “... I was talking to a professor who was talking about supply chain. They said, ‘Remove that wrapper around a cucumber that is on the shelf, [and] the shelf life reduces from eight days to two days.’ And think about not the packaging waste, think about all those efforts — the human effort, the natural resources, all those kinds of things. So we have to take this from a bigger perspective when we talk about sustainability.”

This extends even to the amount of material used for packaging and how products fit on a pallet — something Esko’s Cape Pack software can address — which can have implications further down the supply chain.

“Of course that helps them in their sustainability goals, but it's also about optimizing the entire logistics and supply chain,” Deroo explained. “Cape Pack can help with that as well by getting more products into a case, more cases onto pallets, more pallets onto trucks. And the end result to that is that there are fewer trucks on the road.”

Digital Transformation

The third aspect that survey respondents identified as a high priority for their business in 2024 is digital transformation. As put by Chris Janczar, WebCenter product manager at Esko, there is a stair-step style of digital adoption that will open you up to new opportunities.

“If you're not digitized, you can't automate,” Janczar said. “If you don't automate, you don't have time to think about AI, and AI can then tap back into … collecting the data. AI is nothing if it doesn't have data to work with.”

On the topic of data, Deroo noted that the protection of customer data is built into AI.

“The technology leaders in this field of AI are really those that embed that security into the whole DNA of their culture, but also into the solutions that they're building,” he said.

Additionally, digital transformation provides more data visibility, which can provide better, real-time insights into packaging production.

Speaking on production, Stitzel said that 3D renderings for packaging are critical in digital transformation.

“From doing virtual mockups that are now becoming very commonplace, to doing consumer insight testing and AR and VR — all of those things help us take really time-consuming and expensive processes, and … remove a lot of cost and time.”

Talent Gap

The final major area that the panel discussed was the skilled labor shortage. Not only are an increasing number of people in the workforce retiring, the World Economic Forum estimated in its 2023 “Future of Jobs Report” that there would be a net loss of 14 million jobs over the next five years due to the emergence of new technologies.

“Everything that we're talking about — digital transformation, AI, data — is creating a lot of new job opportunities as well, but these are in a slightly different area,” said Dominic.

When it comes to filling a role on your team, Janczar explained that looking only at someone’s previous experience or qualifications may not be the best route.

“I think that since jobs are changing and they're becoming dynamic, you're really looking for a skill set of how fast you can adapt, how fast you can learn something, and how fast you can apply those learnings to be productive in your job,” he said. “And I think that traditionally what you're looking at — degree and experience — have a little less value in the future as jobs change than they did a decade ago.”

Each of these four interconnected themes will be crucial to the success of the packaging industry in 2024 and beyond.