FuturePrint Podcast
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FuturePrint Podcast
#259 Misalignment: The Hidden Barrier to Sustainable Packaging
What if the greatest barrier to sustainability success isn't cost, materials, or regulation, but something far more fundamental? Matthew Rogerson, founder of The Pack Scout, reveals the startling truth uncovered in his research with over 220 executives from 185 global companies.
Behind the familiar challenges of sustainable packaging lies a profound misalignment that derails even the most well-intentioned initiatives. When departments pull in different directions—procurement focused solely on cost reduction while marketing and sustainability teams push for innovations that inevitably increase expenses—the result is compromised products that satisfy no one completely.
This disconnect extends beyond corporate walls to how companies communicate with consumers. "Companies talk about what they're doing and how it benefits them," Rogerson explains, "but they don't tell you or me as consumers why we should care." This failure to transfer ownership—helping customers see themselves benefiting from sustainable choices—undermines engagement with even the most eco-friendly offerings.
Perhaps most revealing is Rogerson's analysis of sustainable materials. His research demonstrates that virtually every alternative, from seaweed to mushroom-based packaging, would become 30-40% cheaper than virgin materials within approximately 6.5 years. Yet short-term business imperatives prevent companies from making investments that would yield substantial financial and environmental benefits over time.
The path forward requires fundamental shifts: adopting longer time horizons, ensuring all stakeholders collaborate from the outset of projects, establishing shared objectives that transcend departmental goals, and dramatically improving communication with consumers. Rogerson's comprehensive "Sustainable Packaging 2025-2035" report offers practical frameworks and decision-making tools to navigate these challenges.
Discover how to break through the sustainability stalemate and create genuinely aligned strategies that deliver for your business, your customers, and our planet. Connect with Matthew at www.thepackscout.com to learn more about his research and consulting services.
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to this one. Welcome to the latest episode of the Futureprint podcast. Really happy to have with me an expert from the field of both actually events and also packaging, and he's going to talk a bit more about the life he had in events before he became much more focused on unearthing trends and revealing analytical explanations surrounding packaging and more focused actually on sustainability. And anyway, listen, Matthew Rogerson from the PAX GAL. Welcome to the Futureprint Podcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks, marcus, lovely to be here.
Speaker 1:Delighted to have you with us, matthew. I know it's going to be really insightful because we're going to be focusing on a report that you've recently done, which is excellent insight, I think, into both how packaging works and how the threads of sustainability are starting to take shape in in the field. So, but before we get on to that and into the meat of that, matthew, because that is excellent content in itself always like to ask you to introduce yourself a little bit and a little bit about your background. I've alluded that there's a little bit of an events theme in your, in your previous experience with your career and so on. So, yeah, just um, yeah, just to kick off really, um, matthew, I guess it'd be really nice to hear your backstory, um your career journey from event management to editorial to what you do now at the PAX camp. Over to you.
Speaker 2:Thanks. So yes, I have a a rather unique career trajectory to get me where I am today, but I guess all of us kind of arrive where we are after some kind of journey. Mine started in live events and it was in the packaging industry in 2003. I created a platform called Pace, which is the packaging, packaging and Converting Executives, and it was a speed dating event for the packaging industry where the people who recommend, specify and authorize packaging for brand retailers met with their supply chain in private meetings to talk about their technical needs, and we would also run a series of conferences and workshops and sort of really just trying to make it into a one-stop shop for them to have the time and ability to talk directly to those who might be able to help solve their biggest technical challenges of the day. That ran for I mean, it's still running now, but while I was looking after it I did that for about nine years and we had events all over the world. They brought in enormous amounts of money, several tens of billions of dollars of contracts that were signed during them. Interestingly, most of them not from the private meetings but from people just having a chat over tea or a coffee or, you know during like a lunch break or a meal break and I moved from that into editorial, which seems like quite a jarring uh move, but the uh idea strategically in the company and this is still in global data, so it's the same parent company of what I was doing. But what they realized was they needed people who were uh authors or writers or editorial staff to actually understand the industries they were writing about, which was not the case in most of the verticals that we were present in, and so they decided that it would be better to have somebody who understood the packaging market write about it and then teach them how to be a journalist rather than teach the journalist how to be a packaging expert. So I moved into managing about seven global trade titles and the editorial strategy for packaging today converting today packaging and converting intelligence beverage packaging innovation, cosmetics packaging insight, sustainable packaging innovation a couple of other ones as well and that was a wonderful eight years, and that gave me a lot of opportunity to understand how to create narratives and messages that people would actually understand, how to make content engaging and how to make communication to way rather than just sort of telling people things and expecting them to understand it.
Speaker 2:And then I moved from London in 2021 to Los Angeles and I was then moving into industry. So I worked for a company called Jindal and I was responsible for making biaxially oriented polyethylene and polypropylene films, particularly for the 100% recyclable monomaterial films that they're creating that could be used to replace the non-recyclable films in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical and labels markets. And then I managed the commercial strategy, marketing and communications and that product range for them, and then, from 2023, I have been the Pack Scout, so I've been helping companies to really bring clarity to what they think of as the complex business issues that they're facing, and that has focused mainly on sustainability, marketing and communications in the packaging industry, but also quite a lot of activity, as we know, in the print side of things as well, because the two are very much wed to each other, and so that was leading to our working together on the Sustainable Print Manifesto as well, and that's it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that's a nice introduction there, and also I can see how your experience and the roles that you've had really sort of lended you very well now to the, to the kind of what you're doing now. So it's interesting. You started really in a commercial role and then you learned, or you. You obviously have to have a a certain mindset to be able to do it, to be frank, but to be able to see the trends, understand the application of those trends, but, as well as that, the challenges of implementation within supply chains that are often set up in a certain way that may be disinclined to change or disinclined to be able to implement things based on culture and lots of other things. But right now, what would be really really fascinating now is to kind of skip into the Pack Scout because, as you said, you've been doing some work as part of this sort of small team really around a manifesto for more sustainable print. So obviously sustainability has been something you have worked within and observed throughout the past few years. Would that be fair to say?
Speaker 2:Yes, sustainability becomes more and more important from about 2016,. 2017 onwards. So Blue Planet sort of then Davosos, then kind of all the activities that have been taking place, and, um, I think a lot of the confusion over all of that is that there's this sort of wonderful intention that everybody wants to do better or be more purposeful or create less waste, and then we all kind of dive into solving the problem today and then it becomes a massive mess and then people get frustrated with the fact that it's not going where it's supposed to go. The other thing that I found fascinating, particularly in the last few years, is that a lot of the time, companies find it very difficult to communicate between the technical and the consumers, and so they find it very difficult to relay technical areas or material developments in a way that the consumers can kind of understand why that technology is important to them. So that and sustainability together have been the kind of basis of most of what I've been doing the last few years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so you've got the track record, the understanding of the packaging industry, sustainability and so on. So there's a lot of um substance behind what you've been observing and studying. You you've talked to me around and about misalignment and miscommunication at being at the heart of many issues with sustainable packaging. Obviously, you've done this report, which is based on which you can explain the methodology and so on as well, if you don't mind, but this misalignment is such a great word and miscommunication as well being really at the heart of the issues with sustainable. Can you explain really what you mean by that and how this insight really came out of your research?
Speaker 2:yeah, because it really was something that hit me between the eyes, uh, and has been right in front of me the whole time, and I think and I think the main way that I've been able to understand it or see it, because it turns out that misalignment or miscommunication are essentially the actual disease that is causing the problems in sustainable packaging or even just general packaging. In sustainable packaging or even just general packaging, but because they have these layers built on top of them that reflect to us that the problem is cost or materials, or regulation, or consumer needs, or market dynamics or forecasts. There's a plethora of things that it kind of represents as to us. So we're trying to solve all of these symptoms without dealing with the actual main underlying problem, and the reason for that is that it's very well hidden, because misalignment the only way.
Speaker 2:We're a number of executives in the packaging industry to name or to answer three questions. The questions were what is the biggest barrier to sustainability success today for you? The second question was what insights do you need in order to have a better grasp of or to lead sustainability today? And the third was what learning outcomes would you want for a upcoming webinar that we're discussing with them to be able to again kind of really drill down and understand how to address those insights. And the kind of logical or expectation thinking of the results of those questions would be that people would answer the same thing for everything. Because if my barrier is that you know the cost is too expensive for sustainable packaging or sustainable print, then the kind of idea would be that I would probably want to have insight on how to reduce those costs because then I can deal with this barrier and I would want learning outcomes about how do I manage the costs of the cost benefit analysis.
Speaker 2:But what you see instead, when you put those three questions in a kind of descending order matrix, there's no alignment at all. So people are saying, you know, well, my biggest problem is cost, but then I need information on regulatory information and then I need to learn about consumer needs and you're like, okay, they are related, but that's not solving your common problem each time. So what that lack of alignment showed is actually the thing that we're trying to manage or fix is actually an outcome of the fundamental issue, which is misalignment. So if you walk back, any of the problems that any of these companies have in sustainable packaging, sustainable prints or just general prints and packaging, there is always a misalignment at the bottom of it or at the base of it and it has just rippled out and it causes something else to happen down the line, which is what they're trying to solve. But because they're trying to solve the thing that is not the actual source of the problem, you end up in this kind of loop where you're basically not dealing with the actual problem at source. So that's sort of how we got to misalignment.
Speaker 2:And then once you see it, uh, once you name it and you kind of bring it into the light, um, it's very hard to ignore it after that, because then every time you see a problem crop up, um, so, for example, recently there's been stuff like del monte's chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and you're like, oh, okay, well, where did misalignment play a role in that? Well, they had no new product developments, they didn't do any kind of innovation, they didn't have any kind of strategy to move food preservation to kind of move with the times, like on and on and on and on. And then you're like, oh, wait a second, they've literally had no alignment for decades. And then, unsurprisingly, like you know, the end result is that it's gone out of business. So that that's been what the most fascinating part about all of this is that once you see it, you realize, realize that it's a kind of a principle or like an immutable truth.
Speaker 1:And it's really helpful because once you can see it, name it, you can also address it truth, um word there in the sense that it's um, if you get things directionally incorrect, then they don't end up manifesting in the right way further down the uh, further down the supply chain, do they? Or even within the business itself. So it's um pretty, pretty powerful really. Um, obviously, this, a lot of that I I would gain. I would gather that you gained from just having the knowledge anyway, but you actually did also conduct a pretty thorough survey, right? So this extensive survey involving over 200 professionals across the packaging ecosystem.
Speaker 2:A bit about what that revealed, about how different departments like procurement, marketing, sustainability are often perhaps pulling in slightly different or very different directions so there's always been a schism where um, procurement, in particular procurement, um and most other departments of major companies are adults with one another, and that is because the total horizon of most procurements entire world is literally keep the costs down. So you know, pay less, you know like save money, whereas for almost all the other departments there's a, a growth or an expense or a factor in it where they're trying to solve a problem that is more larger than just trying to keep the costs down, and a lot of the time their goals will raise the costs, because if you're trying to have a more efficient supply chain or manufacturing, or if you're trying to market to new people, all of these things have additional costs to them. And so immediately you've got one or two or three or more departments that are in conflict inside a company and what that does is it basically deviates the the goal or the objective. So you know, if you've got three departments and they all agree on the same thing, then the likelihood is that you can create a product that is pretty agile and flows through that and will kind of hit the market and make a lot of sense. The reality today is that almost all companies will have at least one, if not two or three departments with either slightly or massively different goals, and so you're trying to thread a product through this and it's just a. It ends up being too compromised. It never really satisfies anybody, and so the product that then eventually hits the market has a lack of cohesion or strategy or alignment to it, and that also can be kind of seen or sensed by consumers.
Speaker 2:We these days, like I don't even know that I'm doing it, um, consciously, but I pull away from the product that just kind of hits the shelf and looks like it's a complete mess and has no kind of, uh, central messaging or or brand or style or or anything to it. So, um, when we were interviewing, um, there's 220 executives from 185 different companies worldwide and, um, a lot of the conversations with them when it comes to strategy is you know what's? When you ask them, what's holding you back from succeeding in your job at the moment? Invariably most of them it will be a conversation about another department or something external to them within their company that is blocking or hampering or changing progress.
Speaker 2:So in the packaging people's case, it might be that they are being told to reduce materials but still have the same integrity or performance or quality with the people in the marketing department.
Speaker 2:They might be being told you know, we want to get more eyes on, or we want to get more business, but like there's no budget for you to do that, like you know, do it, do it with less money, and you're like well, that's not how it works, um.
Speaker 2:Or in areas like sustainability, what's becoming more and more apparent is that it starts at the top of the businesses, where the executive teams don't really know what their sustainability goal or agenda is, and so they're not able to communicate a cohesive strategy, and so each one of the departments that they're speaking to will slightly deviate it to make their own goals more achievable. So it's not what does the company want to do, but it's how do I do what the company wants to do in a way that feeds my immediate priority objectives? And so you start having this thing that just becomes pulled apart, and that's that's the sort of the uh, the fundamental issue where, um, if you can't have everybody pulling together, uh, then you have that kind of analogy, like you know, like with a rowing boat, with everybody rowing in different directions.
Speaker 1:It's, it's not going to go anywhere yeah, you're going to make a a pretty big splash, but not much of a movement forward. Yeah, good, good analogy, and so it seems that it's some really striking contradictions. Um, so companies, for example, saying their biggest barriers cost, but then seeking insight and regulation or focusing on consumer behavior, and then, and as you've said, the disconnect between perhaps well-intended sustainability goals but more tactical, cultural barriers to that. You mentioned recruitment Get the cheapest, the cheapest, cheapest isn't always the most sustainable. I hear that a lot myself. What does this tell you us? And you know really about the way organizations are approaching sustainability? Is it? Is it just not it just it doesn't sound to me like they've got their act together. I mean it really doesn't. I mean, what does this tell us? Is that fair?
Speaker 2:it is, um, you know they they're playing with both hands tied behind their backs, um, so fundamentally the problem, um, the real problem is that we have a entire society and market that is built on short-term shareholder enrichment. So all of the people are given more money and more resources for raising the value or entering new markets or producing more or making more or selling more, but there isn't a corresponding focus on how do we make more with purpose or sell more with sustainability in mind. And so you get this huge issue of overconsumption, where the company doesn't care that I don't finish off my 50 biscuits, because they're just happy that I've bought the packet of 50 biscuits and there's no reason or lever that's going to make them just do them in proper sizes. Because they can't do it, because their own companies are not allowing it, and they also can't do it because we as consumers would get all up in arms, even though we're not actually eating the size packages we're getting. So you start with something like that, which makes it phenomenally complicated to begin with, and then you have the issue of all of the risk aversion that the companies are involved in today, because nobody wants to be the one to make the big decision that fails, because then you're out of a job and you know you've lost credibility and so nobody kind of swings for the fences anymore. They're all basically very, very kind of controlled and trying to kind of keep it within their own small sphere. So that's why you have these silos that develop within the companies.
Speaker 2:And then the short-term focus of all of it is another massive issue, because in the research for the sustainable packaging report that I wrote, there was a series of cost-benefit analysis we ran on when would sustainable materials be the cheaper option? And the answer is that by and large, literally yeah, every single sustainable packaging material, from seaweeds to shrimp, to mycelia and mushrooms, um, would start to be the most cost effective material, even versus virgin materials. Uh, within about six to six and a half years, um. And then it would start to be like a 20 or 30 or 40 percent difference where, like you know, your mice, your seaweed packaging would be 30 less expensive than your polypropylene or your fiberboard, um, but that six and a half year period to get there, like no one is given that.
Speaker 2:So the thing that is sustainable in the long term we can't get there because everybody is so short-term focused, because no ceo is going to be given a seven-year window to be like, hey, spend all the money now and we'll we'll be really delighted when you can kind of get it back for us in six years or seven years or eight years time. Instead they're being told you know, make more money this year or this quarter or this half. So that's the sort of the challenge that they all have is that they're not really. They're kind of doing the best they can. But sustainability is very difficult when you have this sort of short-term, um choppy focus to what you're trying to do and then you're trying to make all of that into a, an aligned uh, long-term, consistent uh program or or set of products that you're bringing to market yeah it.
Speaker 1:To be fair, it does look very difficult, complex, um, pressured, um, and and really sort of difficult to fathom the way forward, I suppose with a cultural clash there isn't it, between short-termism and long-term requirement. Yet they are all saying that they're committing to sustainability, though. So there is a little bit of a okay gray area there where maybe that's verbally committing but not actually committing, or maybe it's just um, you know, you know, um, not sinister and cynical, it's just the reality that we're all in right now. There are are some brands that are doing good things and there are some that I know are committed to it. Perhaps it's easier if you're a smaller brand, or it's easier if you're a younger business, to embrace the aspects and create a culture. Perhaps it's a bit like changing a huge ocean liner, changing direction, I would imagine. Given the depth of misalignment you uncovered with this, matthew, which is really helpful and fascinating what kind of perhaps practical steps can companies take to begin realigning their strategies and communications, both internally and externally?
Speaker 2:Very good question and yeah, it is. So it sounds like it's a complete mess, but there are both signs of people who are doing really good work in this space, and there is also the good news that none of it is unsolvable or not addressable. So it's not a sort of it's not broken to the extent that we can't do something about it. So the two areas that I've seen the most success on S3, first is timing. So the companies that are showing success and sustainability are taking a much longer term view of it. So there's a wonderful book, uh, by simon cynic called the infinite game, where he talks about there's certain things that are not, in fact, games, but we play them like they are games. So we, you know you don't, you're never going to win at work, you're never going to kind of win your marriage, you're never going to win its sustainability, because it is the whole purpose of sustainability is to be in it for as long as you can with the resources you've got. Um, and so if companies were to stop focusing on what am I doing this week or next week or next month or this year, and, as an extreme example, to be like how are we going to be in business in a thousand years time. But that mindset switch means that actually you're going to be much better resourced day in and day out over the short term, because you're trying to be so focused on the long term that for you to be a business in a hundred years, a thousand years, you're going to need to have everything working a lot better today to allow you to kind of hit that goal.
Speaker 2:The second part is that the companies internally need to get better alignment. So that means you need to involve more people in discussions, in projects. You need to make sure that the people who've got the experience however up or down the supply chain that might be are involved in all the projects. So, rather than having an internal meeting where you decide that you're going to print a package and then you send it to the printers afterwards and say, hey, you know we need you to print this, get them involved at the beginning of the entire discussion so they can say you can't do that and it then just saves you a lot of these blocks from happening in the first place. So just the assembly of all people that are affected, all teams that are affected, centralizing your objective, so getting consensus on what you're trying to do and how you're going to do it, and then having that be the thing that is, you're guiding your north star.
Speaker 2:So, rather than I'm going to do this, how it benefits my particular department or division to change that focus so that you're like OK, our goal is to make this sustainable product and get it out to the market. Therefore, that's what we're all kind of gathering behind. So each one of the different departments that touches it isn't looking at it from a sphere of oh, this is going to ruin my bonus, but they're going to look at it from the sphere of how do I do the maximum good for the company if you can do that, um, and then have a sort of? There's a series of decision trees that I've got that allow you to ask questions like am I using, um, the most sustainable material or process or means to create this product? Does everybody in the team, or everybody who's touching this project, understand what it is that we have as a definition of sustainability? Or what is the goal for this thing, what's the outcome for it? And then, if you can use the guides just to make sure that you are aligned, you have a common definition. Everybody understands that. They're all on the same page.
Speaker 2:When you start the project, the second or third part to it, depending on whether you're kind of talking about short term and long term as the first of these three is to communicate that is to communicate that. So once you've got that alignment organized from the beginning because you've got everybody involved in the project you have an idea and a clear definition of what sustainability means in this context of this project. You then need to communicate it because the probably single biggest problem in the entire market, which is similar to misalignment, is miscommunication, and the miscommunication is that 20, 30% of the time, companies talk about what they are doing in how it benefits them. So their messaging and everything they talk about is you know, we've done this, we've reduced the footprint of our packaging, or we're using this sustainable product, or we're doing this amazing thing. And their messaging, their narrative, their content is all dedicated to what an amazing thing this is for them.
Speaker 2:It doesn't tell you or me as the consumer why I should care. So the so what? Question that you would ask as a consumer, which we ask a lot of the time to help us filter all the marketing noise that we receive day in, day out isn't addressed, there isn't really a reason for me to pick up or engage for that product, because all I'm seeing is why it benefits them. There's nothing that tells me. So you know, when a company says you know, we've reduced our plastic packaging by 60%, then you know, in my head I'm like, okay, well, well, great, so you've taken quite a lot of costs out of your product, but it's still selling at the same price on the shelf, so I don't benefit from what you're doing, um, and therefore I don't care. So it has to do what we call the um.
Speaker 2:There's a famous phrase called the transfer of ownership, uh, which is that nobody buys anything unless they can see themselves or feel themselves or sense themselves using it. So I'm never going to buy anything unless I can actually see myself living in that house, driving that car, drinking that drink, eating that sandwich, whatever it is. And so the first major communication hurdle is to tell them you know, whoever your audience is why what you are doing benefits them, so that they want to consume it or use it or transfer it. And then, if you can do those things, then what you'll have is a product that is aligned. Everybody understands why they're doing it, and then they look at ways, holistically, to make its footprint lighter and make it more sustainable. They then tell the consumers, or the customers, why what they're doing matters to that audience, who are then inclined to actually use it because they're like oh, now I see why it benefits me to use this, so I'm going to use it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the way you've explained it very thoroughly, very logically, step by step, it's clear, it's clear and it's actually relatively simple. But I guess that's the genius of it, isn't it? In that it's not commonplace. So, therefore, a willingness from the leadership team to collaborate and to communicate in that way would, with a longer term view, yield results. But, like you say, if they've got causally pressures, then you can see a conflict there, but that doesn't mean to say it shouldn't be the way forward, though. That's really interesting. So this report, which sounds brilliant, by the way, tell us a bit more about it. Sustainable Packaging 2025 to 2035 report. How do people get a copy, access it and what kind of impact?
Speaker 2:are you hoping it will have across the industry? It's the most comprehensive report certainly I've ever written but that I see on the market today in terms of it breaks down every single one of the areas that is affecting sustainable packaging in the next 10 years. So, whether that is waste management regulations, market dynamics, recycling technologies, forecasts, consumer trends and motivations, manufacturing trends and motivations, there's a chapter that has a breakdown on the key findings from an earlier survey that I did that was looking at sustainability strategies and then also assesses the packaging technology so that you can understand the both the technical components of what materials are going to be on offer in the next 10 years, but, more importantly, from most of the larger companies perspective, the speed, scale and volume or capacity of those products. So one of the perennial problems in sustainable packaging is that there's been too much focus on the technical sustainability of a product rather than the ability to scale that product, because it's no good if you have a 100 sustainable or circular product but you can only make a thousand of them or a million of them and you have a billion product SKU, which is quite a few companies have that problem and so a lot of the time there's a disconnect, so that misalignment crops up, where you have somebody saying, for example, we're going to solve the plastics problem with seaweed and that's great, but there isn't enough seaweed on earth to cover the plastics needs that would be substituted by it, so you can't solve the problem by providing an alternative that doesn't actually allow you to move all of the products into it. So you're only solving part of the problem.
Speaker 2:And the idea behind the report was that, unlike market reports, which both I've written in the past but also I've read or used in my time, I us to make it more of a kind of textbook or guidebook, so that people who are reading it not only understand what's happening in sustainable packaging, but what you can do about it. What are some simple steps or guides or tools that you can use in order to adjust and align. So, similar to the alignment conversation we've been having, there's cost benefit analysis tables, there are traffic light tables talking about different materials or recycling technologies or waste management strategies, no matter what the area is that you're trying to better understand in terms of the sustainable packaging industry. There is information on what's happening and then there's a benchmark and then there's a suggestion on next steps to take in order to avoid falling into the traps that will lead to waste or lost money or lost opportunity. Um, so that's the idea behind the reports.
Speaker 2:There's a landing page for it, um which I'll, uh, I can send you the, the link to kind of put on to the podcast. It's um underneath the pack hub, um, so p-a-c-k-h-u-b? Um with paul jenkins, who I'm working with on the the report, and it's sustainable packaging 2025 to 2035. If you just google that, you'll you'll get a link to the main page. Um, it's 221 pages long.
Speaker 2:Uh, it's got 10 chapters. It's it's an absolute, comprehensive piece of content, and what I'm doing at the moment is anybody who buys the report so all the ones who bought it so far I use a zoom call and strategy session to uh act as a guide for them so that we can then magnify, focus on the specific area that they've got a question about. So you don't have to read all 10 chapters, you don't have to read any of. You know like. You can just hone in on the part that is of most relevance to yourself. Um, and that's what most people have been doing so far. I think most of the companies we're working with who've bought it have got maybe cost materials and then some forecast questions and then a bit about regulations, or maybe they care about consumers and waste and recycling, but all of the information is there so that you can um make sure that you're prepared for anything that's going to happen in the next 10 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds really good actually like. If so, purchase a report and they can also access you, the author, and you can help summarize and navigate through the, like you say, very comprehensive um, filling out the key gems within it. That sounds like a really um, interesting way to tackle it actually. Well, I'm really happy we've had this chat, brilliant um, insight, great report, very thorough, and also some of the themes I think are quite, quite powerful, aren't they? And revealing um, and, and you know, different to a, like you say, different to a market. Market reports are great, but they tend to give you nice figures of growth potentials and all of this and that it sounds a lot more practical and a lot more thought through in terms of helping the reader implement, hopefully, some of these findings.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because when I it's not a problem with market reports, um, but the way that they are designed um is to present data and not to um necessarily have a position or perspective or to um make any kind of suggestions. It's just to present the facts as they are and then allow the reader to then formulate what that means to them and how that sort of fits in. But what I wanted to do in this particular report was to use the fact that one of the biggest gaps in the packaging and the print industry is inexperience, where nine out of 10 times projects are failing because somebody who could have said at the beginning of that project it's not gonna work wasn't in the room or wasn't sort of spoken to. And so I wanted it to be a case of here's the information, here's what's happening in the market. This is what we kind of anticipate happening, but also a little bit of a suggestion of you know, maybe if you don't want to see a loss or experience you know, because other people have experienced these things before.
Speaker 2:So making sure that we use other people's experience to guide in the report saying use other people's experience to guide in the report, saying um, for example, you know, rather than here is all the materials that are available to uh use for sustainable packaging, um, it is important to bear in mind that capacity matters, um, because we don't want people to be like you know well, we're going to go all in for mushroom packaging and then not have enough to package all of their products because, by the time you find that out, you are so committed to this path forward and you've spent millions and millions and millions. So, rather than letting them make that mistake, the report is designed to help guide you to the best possible outcomes and benchmark you against the most successful case studies and stories so that, hopefully, you're not going to make any missteps or mistakes, but also it kind of gives you enough information so that you don't fall into any kind of blind alleys or traps that are upcoming.
Speaker 1:And, like you say, that in itself is fantastic, isn't it? De-risking elements and understanding where not to make investments in time and resources that may not yield the scale, as you were explaining earlier, and stuff like that which in isolation you wouldn't necessarily see, would you? For all the right reasons. So, yeah, it's complicated, it's complex. This sounds like a great report. Really appreciate your time, matthew. Really interesting conversation with you and um the website.
Speaker 2:Your website is the pack scoutcom it's wwwthepackscoutcom, so p-a-c-k-s-c-o-u-tcom or t-h-e, the pack scout yeah, yeah, brilliant, so people can connect with you there and on linked.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, thanks again for joining us. Really interesting stuff and, yeah, I hope that I'm sure this will go on to be a huge success the report itself and, obviously, you being part of the manifesto for more sustainable print as well. We get the benefit of your insight within creating that and that project, so that's all good. So, thanks very much again.
