AI Lights the Path for a Circular Future: Packaging World

What are the dominant forces shaping packaging over the next decade?

Editor-in-Chief Matt Reynolds sits down with Brian Wagner, co-founder of PTIS Global, to discuss how AI is reshaping packaging faster than expected. New PTIS research shows brand owners, data, and technical expertise will define who leads, and who falls behind.

Find the full featured article on Packaging World.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Through the Line, the podcast exploring innovations and information across the packaging and processing landscape. From topics impacting consumer packaged goods and healthcare packaging to the latest technologies in food processing operations.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hi, I'm Matt Reynolds, editor of Packaging World magazine, back with another edition of the Through the Line podcast. Have a listen as I interview Brian Wagner. He's a co-founder of the packaging consultancy PTIS. They just completed their semi-annual Foresight Research, which looks 10 years down the road to project what will be impacting packaging in 2035 and the intervening years between now and then, of course. So as you can imagine, AI and sustainability factor heavily into our discussion. Welcome, Brian. Why don't you introduce yourself and PTIS?

SPEAKER_02 0:51

Sure, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. So I'm a co-founder of PTIS. I've spent my 43-year career in the world of packaging, packaging degree from Michigan State University. After 17 years of bouncing around big companies and small, I started PTIS with a partner, Mike Richmond, and we're now in a 26-year management consulting, staff augmentation, all things packaging.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Okay, and for a few decades of that 26 years at least, you've been doing this triannual research. Why don't you describe some of the background there before we get into the meat of this year's research?

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Sure, absolutely. Back when I was at Kellogg's in 1998, we were part of a future packaging program run by futurists in Washington, D.C. I'd never heard of such a thing. And it was really eye-opening that there is this science and art of looking at the future. Nobody predicts it, but we can project out and it can really help us with planning. So in 2004, we led our own program with roughly 15 companies from across the value chain. We met three times throughout the year, and that became the program. And that every three years since we take another look out 10, 20 years at the future, we bring it back to how we can apply that in our strategies over the next one, three, and five years.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Okay. And I think this most recent duration was mostly collected in 2025 and it's projecting out to 2035. So what was really different this year? What really blew your hair back and says, wow, this is something's changed.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

Yeah, so it and as an input to this future packaging program, we conduct a global thought leader survey. So that was a reference to my presentation. I think the biggest thing is the pace of change. We were looking out probably nine years ago when we saw this thing that could be Jet AI. We didn't call it that. We just we were already talking about quantum computing, which could be out there, but nobody really knew how. And now they're really becoming a reality. They're moving quicker, and the environment's a big deal, has been getting bigger. The population of the world is growing and resources are limited. But I think the pace of change because of technology.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Okay. And technology mentioned Gen AI. What are some why don't you ground that in real packaging use cases? Where do you see that impacting packaging already? And where do you see projecting out to 2035 those impacts happening?

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Yeah, the it's super interesting. We've researched that a bit, and AI itself goes back to the 90s. So it's not new. We've been using it, and it's just gotten faster and better. And companies like Nestle have reduced their speed to market for product and package development by months, lots of months. So the speed to market, the quality assurance without the use of people, automation online, the internet of packaging, and digitizing everything. And innovation is happening in a lot of different areas. But within packaging, everything getting smaller, everything getting faster, everything getting smarter. Amazon has made an investment in visual systems, optical sensing systems on conveyors and municipal recycling facilities that aren't looking for codes on packaging. They're detecting the material in a very sophisticated way.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

And generating a lot of data about that material to learn about right down to the brand level, whether it's Dr. Pepper or Coke, and those brands that can be fed back to those brands to it, you know, inform and impact their packaging.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Good. And you made one quote that stood out to me today was you can't really predict, but you can prescribe. And one of your prescriptions was invest in AI training and learning, just so your so these brands know how to use these systems.

SPEAKER_02 4:19

Yeah. One of the things about the foresight work we do and looking out 10 years, we have to be careful because we present it and people go back to work to their day-to-day. And that's happening with AI. And a lot of companies are cautious of AI for really good security reasons. And that's leading a lot of people in their jobs to not spend any time on AI. It's there. They're waiting for their company to dictate how they use it. And there is a there's a language of AI, and that came out in the surveys. We need to become literate in AI. And the presentation I put together was a combination of Elon Musk Rock in terms of content, Microsoft Copilot. It was something called Gamma AI that makes great slides. Okay. And a lot of people don't even know the terminology. And now Claude apparently is making even better PowerPoints than Microsoft Copilot can, but Microsoft will catch up. It's just such a rapidly changing world. And the presentation after mine was on agents, agentic AI. That's fascinating. There's a what was just a newsletter called Industry Intelligence, is now an AI fed, four or five different agents, one on one piece RD, one laws and regulations, another it's whatever they are, consumer research. And it reports up to an agent that's your buddy at work. Okay. And your assistant.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

So if it's an aggregator that is also a synthesizer.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

So that's my job.

SPEAKER_02 5:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

It's coming from my job too. So another interesting, we're talking about all of the technologies that are out there, and I think this is happening in parallel. The last few years, last few iterations of your survey, you've seen some of the softer skills being like come to the top collaboration. But now you saw right back to the top is that technical literacy.

SPEAKER_02 6:01

I at lunch today, that came up as the biggest finding. We're in a very technical group at the International Safe Transit Association, and they really believe material science, distribution testing, those technical elements of packaging are so critical. And I fully agree with them. But there is this other side. 180 some people replied to our survey, and it is the soft skills. And I don't think people think about that. You don't go to school to learn collaboration. You don't go to learn necessarily how to communicate more effectively and compassion and those sorts of things. But in our world of packaging, science and technology, data and analytics, they're back. We need to focus on them.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Back to collaboration, though. One of the other AI and the high technology is definitely it's number one with a bullet right now. But in the background is sustainability and more specifically, circularity. And one of the things we talk about in industry is cross-industrial collaboration, you know, pre-competitive collaboration. So that's where you see those soft skills still still extremely important for professionals and future professionals in our industry. So again, circularity, you were specific. You didn't say sustainability, you were more narrow and more specific in saying circularity. What did the results of the survey say about circularity between now and 2035?

SPEAKER_02 7:17

It says it's one of the biggest opportunities and one of the biggest risks. Okay, so it's two sides to the same coin. Yeah, and it is tied to sustainability, but it really has to do with, in my mind, how do we develop products and packaging for end of life or end of use, as opposed to let's keep using the same old products, the same old packaging that can't be recycled. We can be a whole lot smarter about the way we develop things. Sure. And that would be the complete circularity. We also need to look very holistically at packaging, is the hero as I look at it. Food waste is a way bigger problem than packaging waste. And more packaging in advanced processes like retort and aseptic and so on.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

It's shelf life extenders.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

Yeah. So I think we need to keep that in mind. It's not just about making packaging that can be recycled. It's really looking at the big picture, impact on the environment, and making sure that we're being responsible for the raw materials that we extract and use.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Okay. Now, another interesting within that, under that umbrella of circularity, something that came out in the research is historically everybody's looked to uh expected the re the retailers or government to be the leaders behind that, retailers being the ones that have a lot of pull in the industry and government basically, and making everybody working instead of competitively work together. But you're finding that brand owners themselves are likely to be the leaders in circularity in packaging.

SPEAKER_02 8:40

That's what showed up in the survey. And again, we're asking in 2035 who's it going to be. And the projection is that the brand owners will play a bigger role. And I think it makes sense that right now with EPR in the United States, PPWR in Europe, they're looking for the brand owner to be responsible and a bit of a victim to some extent. Okay. They're the target.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Yeah, they've got they're coming for their wallets.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Yeah, they are. They are. And I think because of that, they're not going to stand still. They are part of the EPR movement and making sure that it's being done responsibly. So I think that will continue. And they know more about packaging than do certainly than do the laws, the regulators, yeah, the elected officials.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

But more than retailers as well. They know about shelf space. They don't know about the materials that go onto it necessarily. Yeah. Although I would say there is a significant contingent that have their own private brands that are deal or private label brands that are dealing with the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

Yeah, the brand owners, a term I like to use all the time, is the specifiers. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

There you go.

unknown 9:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

We've talked about AI, we've talked about circularity, we've just talked about regulation and who's going to be leading. How, as a brand owner or a CPG or a contract packager, how do you balance all these things? If when you just said with delete off, the pace of change is accelerating. Yeah. How do you make sure that you've got all these plates spinning all at once?

SPEAKER_02 9:59

Well, as I presented, I thought about we have a really narrow list of things to focus on in truth. It's a complex world out there. You could be concentrating trying to focus on a thousand things. It's really not. We're saying focus on circularity, sustainability, AI, what it means for material science, and so on. So the research narrowed that, and that's a good thing. Leveraging foresight to a large extent doesn't mean you change what you're doing today. You monitor these things. As we talk about Horizon 1, 2, 3 and strong and weak signals that maybe these things are coming true and we do or don't need to invest in them because we're projecting. We can't predict the future. So it's really important to monitor them and have somebody in your organization who can do that and with brand owners specifically in the packaging department or supporting the packaging department. And AI tools, again, there's going to be agents who can do that for you where it won't necessarily take away from the time you're spending day to day, and you can have it give you updates as needed. Or in the case that I spoke with a DP of packaging with a company, big brand owner, a couple of weeks ago, and she said she still wants to come to us as a consultant to do her technology scouting.

unknown 11:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 11:13

Because she doesn't have time, you know, to work in 10-hour days, most of it in meetings.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

I know that's the only it's but what you're saying is what I described as like all these competing, all these elements that are competing for our attention, what you're describing is a convergence of these elements to all use AI to help solve some of these other problems or leverage government or leverage EPR to help incentivize people to move. So it's really, it strikes me as more of a convergent. Packaging insights, tell tell our audience how people can either get involved or find it, it's on your website, or how can they leverage some of whether it's your executive summary or actually to get involved in some of this engagement.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

Yeah, we would love to have you contact us. You can contact me directly at Brian B R I A N at PTISglobal.com. Website is ptisglobal.com. We've got a packaging foresight newsletter, and we would love to hear from you and have that discussion.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

And you can also find PTIS regularly in the pages. Yes, pages, physical pages of a physical magazine of Packaging World magazine every I'd say three months or so, three times a year.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Thank you for listening to Through the Line Packaging and Processing. You can listen to more episodes on all streaming platforms. Be sure to visit us at packworld.com, profoodworld.com, and healthcarepackaging.com for more packaging and processing news. This podcast was edited by Bree Guns.