Packaging E-Commerce Trends

During the holiday shipping frenzy, the average consumer likely overlooked an important element of e-commerce: the shape of their packages.

When it comes to the efficient movement of goods through the supply chain via e-commerce channels, squared-off designs like cardboard boxes reign. Some say that form is better for marketing and transportation emissions reduction efforts, too. 

In certain cases, brands are transitioning away from flexible packaging and toward rigid square or rectangular shapes; sometimes they’re making a return to boxes after using other formats for a while. Performance, efficiency and sustainability factors play a role in the choice toward “squarification;” flexible packaging can be prone to getting squashed and moved around in transit more than boxes.

But there's a key reason box-shaped packaging currently dominates e-commerce: robots. 

“E-commerce is becoming increasingly automated,” said Leon Nicholas, vice president of retail insights and solutions at Smurfit Westrock. “Robots generally do better with things that are squared and perfectly dimensionalized.”

The robots used in e-commerce fulfillment typically pick up objects via suction, and they generally aren't able to grab flexibles as well as boxes.

“It's very, very difficult to utilize mailers or any kind of really flexible packaging material with automation. Automation always works best when something is sort of rigid and square or rectangular," said Greg Walls, vice president of revenue at cartonization software company Paccurate.

Squarification isn't just a design consideration for secondary packaging, either. Some brands are transitioning to rigid square or rectangle packaging as more products ship in their own containers, known as SIOC. Consumer products like snacks or pet food that traditionally used flexible packaging in some cases are showing up in boxes, which are ideal for SIOC. The same is true for certain products that primarily used to be sold in bottles or jugs, such as wine and laundry detergent.

Plus, for primary packaging, “we’ve seen some very interesting shifts to square packaging in the vitamin and mineral category, particularly by new brands like Olly and Natrol, and specifically in the gummy segment,” said Ron Sasine, advisor to Kearney's Product Excellence and Renewal Lab and former senior director of packaging for private brands at Walmart.

Square shapes also are preferred for omnichannel packaging, or “packaging that does just as well on a shelf as it does on a pallet as it does in a locker or picked by a robot,” Nicholas said. This is valuable as more retailers fulfill e-commerce orders by pulling products to ship from their brick-and-mortar back rooms, instead of using separate distribution centers.

“That is going to be what eventually permits those large retailers to put products in people's hands in the shortest amount of time, at the fastest ease of distribution,” Sasine said, noting this model’s use at Walmart, Kroger and Whole Foods retail stores.

Data points to e-commerce continuing to boom: A quarterly report that RaboResearch released in December showed that adjusted e-commerce sales in North America comprised 16.2% of total retail sales and called e-commerce “the most important driver for containerboard demand.”

That same month, market research company Smithers forecasted that corrugated had the highest growth rate among e-commerce packaging, with a 9.5% compound annual growth rate through 2029. This follows Smithers reporting in 2023 that corrugated is the most common type of e-commerce packaging, representing 80% of the market.

Plus, large retailers and e-commerce companies increasingly are automating their operations. These factors will increase reliance on squared-off packaging — instead of round, irregularly shaped or flexible options — in the coming years, sources say.

“Automation, by its very nature, prefers rectangular prisms,” Sasine said. “Geometry that favors automation is going to be more important in the future. It will become a big driver of packaging design for both primary and secondary formats.”

Are you dense?

Despite some companies’ preference for squared-off packaging, “you don't want to have a square with air,” Nicholas said. There’s an industrywide push for package and shipment densification, or what Nicholas dubbed "the war on air," to improve shipping sustainability, efficiency and cost effectiveness.

Dimensioning, or calculating the weight and volume dimensions of a package, factors into supply chain planning, optimization and costs. 

“FedEx and UPS penalize you if you have a lot of air in your package. ... That's more or less the intent of what they call dimensional weight,” said Paccurate’s Walls. “If you ship less air, you're wasting less money and you're wasting less material.”

Squared-off packaging often allows for greater shipment density — as long as it fits rather snugly to the product. That's where rightsizing enters the equation. 

While hand-packing stations at distribution centers typically have a limited stock of different box sizes on hand, rightsizing equipment forms the minimum-sized box required around a product. The concept also reduces or eliminates the need for void fill.

“Rightsized packaging is definitely a trend that we're seeing. ... Shipping costs and fuel costs continue to increase, so there's more and more focus on this type of packaging initiative,” said David Gray, senior vice president of sales at automated packaging system supplier Sparck Technologies. “The cost savings is the number one driver for people who adopt our solution. But sustainability is also a very important aspect.”

Rightsizing is “definitely more efficient during shipping, because you're not shipping as much air — you're able to fit more boxes into your truck. There's more carbon reduction that way,” said Xinnan Li, packaging and logistics analyst at RaboResearch.

Rightsizing also can be a way to reduce the amount of packaging material used, which aligns with numerous brands’ and e-commerce providers' sustainability goals. For instance, Amazon has repeatedly touted its ongoing efforts for lightweighting and packaging reduction.

But not all box rightsizing efforts produce the full intended benefits. In some cases, automated packing machines fold over, rather than cut off and recycle, excess box material during rightsizing, Li explained. The doubled-up box walls still produce a smaller-sized box that improves shipment density, but they don't fully support material reduction efforts. Therefore, rightsizing’s impact on “corrugated usage is not as big as people previously thought” when looking at the square footage of box material used, Li said.

Flexibles aren’t being squeezed out of the marketplace, though. Automation is advancing to allow robot pickers to be faster and more precise, including with grabbing flexible or round objects. And plenty of companies are turning to flexible packaging — either plastic or fiber — instead of rigid boxes to reduce the overall amount of packaging material they use.

Those secondary packaging solutions still are only used for a subset of e-commerce shipments — such as mailers for clothing or small items — and boxes continue to lead the space, sources say. 

“I definitely think the poly bags are going away. We are seeing people looking to move into cardboard mailers,” Walls said.

Marketing modifications

Switching from rounded to squared-off primary packaging can also bring marketing benefits. At a basic level, more messaging is visible on flat panels than on round packaging. Consumers respond differently to various packaging shapes, too.

Sasine said he was previously involved with packaging research that concluded it would be more efficient and sustainable to transition the industry standard of tall, narrow cartons to those that are shorter and more squat. However, the consumer “interprets tall as value driving, and short as a lesser-value product,” he said. 

Sometimes, consumers view shape changes as a sign of shrinkflation, Sasine said, citing the recent backlash over the new juice bottle shape Tropicana introduced in 2024, which is more rectangular than the previous, signature curvy version. While the standard bottles did decrease in size from 52 ounces to 46 ounces, Tropicana said it lowered the manufacturer’s suggested retail price accordingly.

“Getting the consumer to understand what a format change means and why it's beneficial is, at the end of the day, a critical component,” he said. “Without the consumers’ willing adoption of the innovation, you'll eventually see the brand owner go back to something that the consumer can accept and understand."

Because greater density results in reduced packaging sizes, "you're looking at a smaller billboard" for on-pack branding and messaging during certain design switches, Smurfit Westrock's Nicholas said. 

“Therein lies part of the tension,” he said. “It requires testing to ensure shoppers are still engaged.”

That being said, expert predictions overwhelmingly indicate the square isn't going anywhere for e-commerce packaging.

“Will we see more square formats? Absolutely,” Sasine said. “There's a lot to be said for three-dimensional squaring.”

Businesses in many countries have hit pause on new deals or investments due to recent economic uncertainty amid tariffs. But the trade war is also prompting certain packaging companies to rework their supply chains — and it’s unknown how widespread and lasting of a mark these changes will leave on fiber trade patterns.

Containerboard and the fiber materials it's made from are all traded heavily across U.S. borders, as are goods packaged in corrugated boxes. As such, a global fiber supply chain reorganization could become a long-term effect of tariffs, RaboResearch recently reported. 

Already, some paper and packaging companies are saying that they have altered their supply chains in response to tariffs. For example, Smurfit Westrock shifted some production among its sites in Canada and the United States during the last three months, executives said on their May earnings call. In February, during the early days of tariff threats, executives at Cascades also discussed strategies they were devising to mitigate potential tariff impacts. 

So far, “I have seen examples of some supply chain shifts, but not major,” said Anish Thanatil, North America lead for BCG’s forestry, pulp, paper and packaging work. But there’s some evidence that packaging demand rose in Q1 as certain customers intentionally made purchases sooner to boost inventory and avoid potentially higher prices once tariffs kick in. 

Thanatil and co-authors recently wrote about a “new playbook” for packaging companies in North America. While the authors initially wrote the report last year, they made modifications based on various developments in recent months, including tariffs, Thanatil said.

Geopolitics and trade don't affect all packaging substrates evenly, he said, noting that metals have the most direct exposure to tariffs due to the sector's high volume of imports and lesser degree of vertical integration. While the United States also is a net importer of paper, it's at a lower level than with metals. 

Compared with metal, "fiber is probably going to be affected a bit more based on demand fluctuations, rather than supply chain fluctuations," Thanatil said, but acknowledged "it's very difficult to predict."

Short-term and indirect impacts

Some packaging companies are enacting defensive, short-term changes in response to tariffs, which experts caution comes with downsides. "Most of the packaging companies that are right now largely reacting on short-term trends are possibly losing an opportunity to look at some long-term trends," Thanatil said. 

To build resilience into their systems, packaging companies must understand how the end markets for each of their packaging formats will be affected by short-term uncertainty as well as five to 10-year mega-trends around sustainability and e-commerce, Thanatil said. "These are trends that are not going to go away anytime in the near future, so the structured portfolio choices and the [capital expenditure] choices should be based on those."

Although there is still strong growth in e-commerce, which RaboResearch says is the variable most affecting containerboard demand right now, consumer weakness amid tariffs also factors into paper and packaging demand. 

“Containerboard is very sensitive to industrial, but also consumer, demand,” said Xinnan Li, packaging and logistics analyst at RaboResearch. “So when the overall economy slows down,” as RaboResearch predicts, “there's less demand for containerboard as well."

This uncertainty has also chilled investments into a holding pattern as companies await better clarity.

“From a [capital expenditure] perspective, it's pretty detrimental” as companies are “not pulling the trigger in terms of investments,” Li said. “I would not be surprised if we hold until the end of the year — or even into next year.” On the M&A front, drop-offs occur partly because it's “really difficult to value a business with this type of uncertainty,” she said.

These elements also stand to influence if and when containerboard producers launch another price increase, which RaboResearch's Q1 report projected will occur by the end of 2026 at the latest, but likely this year. Analysts are still working on a potential update to their demand and pricing forecast.

“I think the overall impact from tariffs may be more than what we expect,” Li said, forecasting a possible decrease in demand growth this year before a potential recovery in 2026. 

Long-term trade flow revamp

Paper and packaging flows have already been changing in recent years. Earlier this year, RaboResearch released a report describing how import policies that China implemented over the last decade have changed the global flow of paper and packaging. If the researchers create an updated fiber trade map five years from now, “it might look very different again – and part of the reason is tariffs,” Li said. Companies are “trying to find different trade partners, different markets, different buyers and different sellers.”

Under the reworked flows, China likely would still be a fiber importer, regardless of whether it’s recovered paper, virgin fiber or other forms, Li said. But the twist is that businesses in China “don't necessarily have to buy from the U.S. anymore. That's a continued change, a continued impact, from the tariffs and also geopolitics,” she said, explaining that other countries also could make trade deals amongst themselves and cut out the United States.

Brazil is rising to prominence for its fiber supply, and it already sells a lot to China and other Southeast Asian countries, according to Li. While Brazil's exports to that region could increase, it might also move to bump up its fiber exports to the United States, in light of U.S. trade disputes with Canada and Europe, she explained.

“There's more and more discussions about, for example, Brazilians coming into the U.S. and buying a plant. They're looking at hard assets,” Li said.

Brazilian pulp company Suzano has pushed to enter the U.S. market, making an unsuccessful bid to purchase International Paper in 2024. Its first foray into the U.S. occurred with last year's purchase of two mills from Pactiv Evergreen. Now the company is said to be among the contenders to purchase IP's global cellulose fibers division, Brazilian publication Valor reported in April.

What happens next with fiber trade is anyone's guess. Based on past experiences with major events that altered global trade, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the fiber trade shifts that are in motion will likely stick, while others revert.

“In COVID, everybody was talking about ‘just in case’ versus ‘just in time.’ When we no longer needed ‘just in case,’ everybody resorted back to 'just in time' to reduce their burden on the balance sheet,” Li said.

That supports Thanatil's assertion that companies should try to focus more on the long game instead of reacting quickly to potentially short-lived trends. 

“We are not clear how this trade scenario will land,” Thanatil said. “Most people are just waiting and watching.”

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By EFI

The Hidden Costs of Retail Repackaging… And How Smarter Corrugated Solutions Can Help

Retailers are asking more from their supplier partners when it comes to packaging. From shelf-ready case configurations to display-ready units with precise counts, the burden often falls on brands to manually repack products to meet evolving retail requirements. And while these adjustments may seem minor, they come with serious operational costs.

Manual Repacking: A Growing Operational Strain

Consumer goods companies are increasingly relying on co-packers or in-house teams to reformat packaging after initial production. This process, often required to meet the specifications of major retailers like Walmart and Target, adds significant labor, introduces fulfillment delays, adds more material like tape and filler, and increases the chance for errors. According to Industrial Packaging, these hidden costs can add up quickly, becoming a persistent drain on resources and margins and delaying speed to shelf.

Packaging Leaders Are Prioritizing Efficiency

A recent PMMI report shows over 78% of CPG professionals rated productivity as their top priority, That focus on productivity is prompting many to reevaluate packaging; not just for its protective or aesthetic qualities, but as a lever for operational agility.

To remain competitive, packaging leaders must reevaluate where they allocate innovation budgets. Operational efficiency, particularly when it solves recurring pain points like repackaging, is now a strategic advantage.

A New Approach: Box Production + Digital Print

One emerging solution combines shipping carton automation with high-speed digital printing. New systems like the Packsize EFI X5 Nozomi allow manufacturers to create fully printed, custom, right-sized boxes that meet retailer requirements, on demand and at speed.

By integrating digital print with automated box forming, these systems eliminate the need for manual repacking or outsourced co-packing. The result is a right-sized, retailer-ready box produced in a matter of seconds, complete with unique barcodes, branding, or messaging per SKU. Brands can meet specific retailer mandates while also maintaining version control and print consistency, all without tooling or plates.

As highlighted by Packaging World, combining digital print with automated right-sizing supports both speed and sustainability, helping brands reduce material usage and shipping inefficiencies.

Supporting Branding Without Sacrificing Speed

Strong branding remains essential, especially in today’s crowded omnichannel environment. With digital print, brands don’t have to choose between creative packaging and supply chain efficiency.

Digital print enables:

• Vibrant, high-impact retail graphics
• Dynamic customization for regions, promotions, or seasons
• Print-on-demand flexibility for short runs or just-in-time orders
• Co-location with fulfillment or manufacturing

With the right system in place, print becomes a value-add across operations; not just a finishing touch, but a driver of speed, accuracy, and responsiveness.

Packaging as a Retail-Readiness Tool

Consider a midsize personal care brand supplying multiple retailers. Each retailer demands a different case configuration: some in 6-packs, others in shelf-ready trays. Previously, they relied on a co-packer to rework bulk shipments, costing time and money.

With X5 Nozomi’s automation and digital print, they now can produce custom-formatted packaging on-demand as part of the standard workflow. Not only does this reduce manual labor, but it also gets product to shelf faster, improves presentation, and allows for regional or seasonal design changes without the delays or waste associated with traditional print methods.

The Bottom Line

Retail packaging demands are becoming more complex, and the cost of sticking with manual, labor-intensive repacking is only increasing. Forward-thinking brands are turning to digital corrugated solutions that serve both form and function, supporting brand expression and operational agility in one.

By investing in smarter, retailer-aligned corrugated packaging strategies, companies can reduce costs, speed fulfillment, and create a more responsive supply chain.

Five years ago , the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic and the U.S. declared a public health emergency. The packaging industry, like others, experienced a wide range of changes.

“COVID-19 accelerated a lot of trends that were already in progress at the time,” said Jennifer Christ, manager of consumer and commercial goods research at The Freedonia Group.

In 2020 and the years that followed, the pandemic changed much of life — and business operations — as people knew it. Customer inventory fluctuations impacted packaging sales for many quarters. Today, some of the impacts of operational changes and consumer trends still have a mark in manufacturing and packaging formats themselves.

Pandemic lockdowns also changed where people spent disposable income. Consumers transitioned to buying more packaged goods versus spending as much on experiences, leading to a demand boom for some manufacturers.

“You couldn't go to the movie theaters, you couldn't go to see Taylor Swift,” said Ryan Fox, corrugated packaging market analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “And so what did we see people do? They bought new furniture,” new appliances, new bicycles — you name it.

Consumption and demand patterns evolve

E-commerce is at the forefront of sticky trends that the pandemic accelerated. 

There was especially a spike in box demand, Fox explained. At their peak in early 2022, some lead times increased to 10 or more weeks (by comparison, average lead times in early 2025 were approximately eight days, according to Fox.) It was hard for businesses to keep up with the huge demand, in part because people who had been in the corrugated box production for decades were “worked to the bone” and some left the industry, he said.

Consumers used more packaging as they moved away from in-person retail toward online shopping, Christ said. That led to the development of more “e-commerce-ready packaging that is designed for shipping instead of the retail shelf.”

The rise of e-commerce has also prompted form-factor changes. In one example, the industry underwent “a shift from boxes to mailers as shipments were more frequent and included fewer items,” she said, along with “more development of flexible packaging to enable lighter weight and more compact shipments.”

As for meals, there was also a “huge move to food delivery,” which required more packaging, Christ said. While both food delivery and carryout were well-established options for pizza and quick-service restaurants, the rise of third-party, app-based ordering and COVID-era consumer habit changes accelerated that movement in other food service segments, she said. That trend persists.

“While diners did return to in-house dining, the convenience of carryout and delivery has kept that activity elevated from pre-COVID times, establishing a new and much higher norm to grow from,” Christ said.

This has contributed to innovations with packaging design, she said, including with tamper-evident packaging to help food to retain its quality and prevent contamination or spills during transport.

In addition, the food delivery trend supports the enhanced push for sustainable packaging, Christ said.

“The increasing use of single-use delivery packaging made the amount of waste generated more obvious to consumers, and thus increased the call for more sustainable options,” she said. “Of course, this move has been muted by inflationary pressures,” she said, as it makes consumers less amenable to paying premiums for sustainable packaging.

Technology and supply chain shifts

A decline in experienced workers around the time of the pandemic necessitated more investment in new equipment and automation, Fox noted. “That has probably been the number one mark on the industry: how do you deal with the people that actually make this thing happen?”

While remote access, robotics and other digital technologies weren’t new at the time, pandemic-era limitations forced many companies to more seriously consider them, said Jorge Izquierdo, vice president of market development at PMMI, the Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies.

“During all those years of growth, we saw investment [in] all types of equipment, primary packaging, secondary packaging, end of the line,” the latter being related with workforce challenges, he said. “COVID was really a catalyzer for the adoption of remote technologies.” 2020, 2021 and into 2022 were big years for investment.

Without the pandemic shakeup, it likely would have “taken maybe twice as many years to get where we are today in terms of new technologies and investment by manufacturers of consumer products,” he said.

Pandemic disruptions also had implications for how companies managed their supply chains. In some cases, where companies had trouble sourcing their typical materials, it revealed how existing equipment wasn’t necessarily adaptable to new materials, said Izquierdo. Additionally, many companies started looking at how to shorten and diversify supply chains.

From the product manufacturer side of things, there were takeaways for future periods of disruption, explained Brian Stepowany, packaging R&D senior manager at B&G Foods, whose brands include Green Giant, Cream of Wheat and Crisco. Should there be another crisis, it would be easier to manage robots than a large workforce of people, he said.

The challenging time actually strengthened and prompted greater appreciation for relationships with suppliers, said Stepowany, a board member with the Institute of Packaging Professionals. “I think because of the crisis and the requirements to get our products out to the consumers, it caused us to work a lot closer together.”

As for thinking about supply chain resilience and diversification, Stepowany said his company “definitely addressed having a potential wider base, but the packaging industry and supplier base is changing. There's a lot of suppliers going away,” he said, citing recent combination announcements between Smurfit Kappa and WestRock as well as Amcor and Berry.

It gets to be a challenging scenario “to make sure you're not putting all your eggs in one basket per se, that you would have a secondary source in case company A has a strike or company B has a [plant catastrophe],” he said. “So we have to have a secondary source at least qualified and ready to go.”

Xinnan Li, packaging and logistics analyst at RaboResearch, expanded on this.

“As the industry gets more consolidated, it is harder for customers to diversify because wherever they go is kind of the same large players,” Li said. “And actually very similarly for the small-medium sized packaging producers as well; as the industry gets more consolidated, but also more vertically integrated ... it is harder [to source fiber] on the most open market, the size of the pie is just getting smaller.”

For companies that survived and came out well after the volatility of the pandemic, a future disruption may be a little less intimidating. But still, the consolidated nature of industry doesn’t necessarily help.

Given uncertainty in the economy right now with changing trade policies and more, “the next couple of years maybe also requires a lot of diversification or reshuffling of their supply chain,” she said. “This whole supply chain issue is ongoing.”

The rapid growth of e-commerce is changing how Americans purchase and receive goods, and it’s also forcing changes to product packaging. The COVID-19 pandemic also drove significant change to the landscape, said speakers at the 2024 E-PACK conference in Chicago.

“Now we're going online first” to browse instead of going to traditional stores, said Poonam Goyal, sector head and senior equity analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, pointing to solid e-commerce sales growth even since the pandemic “pop” in 2020. Consumers have “normalized” after the post-pandemic desire to go back to brick-and-mortar stores and are settling into a routine that leverages the convenience of online shopping.

Amazon remains the e-commerce leader, currently comprising about 30% of the $1.6 trillion in online sales, Goyal said. But “if anyone can close the gap to Amazon in a matter of time, it would be Walmart,” she said. “They have the resources to put into place to drive the growth.”

Despite the sector growth, recent economic pressures may prompt consumers to trade down, or seek products that are comparable to premium products but at lower prices. “Consumers are looking for deals ... unless they need the product right away,” Goyal said. “They’re buying what they need versus what they want.”

All of these factors influence the kind of packaging that brands use for items that will be shipped, said other E-PACK speakers. For instance, many cost-conscious consumers are currently more inclined to purchase multipacks than individual items, so brands are responding with different e-commerce formats.

Amazon itself has highlighted recent packaging changes, many of which are driven by the company’s sustainability push. The company released 2023 data showing it avoided more than 446,000 metric tons of packaging and decreased the average plastic packaging weight per shipment by 9% from the previous year.

In 2023, Amazon shipped 12% of orders without additional packaging as part of its “ships in product packaging” initiative, up from 11% in 2022. As of this month, the e-commerce giant eliminated plastic air pillows from delivery packaging and transitioned to 100% recycled paper filler. And it reports having retrofitted 120 automated packaging machines that made plastic bags to now make rightsized paper bags; last year the company introduced its first distribution facility with machinery retrofitted and upgraded to only handle paper packaging.

Here are three other examples of brands’ e-commerce packaging design considerations and changes that speakers highlighted at E-PACK:

Mars Wrigley

Innovating packaging design with e-commerce in mind is different than for traditional retail, and the candy company is upping its attention to the former. To guide these decisions, Mars Wrigley created an evaluation framework with critical criteria that include profitability, sustainability, efficiency, protection and appeal.

“There's a lot of intentionality right now to get the whole organization to do more” in e-commerce, said Paola Appendini, a principal for packaging innovation and breakthrough technology at Mars. “We also want to make sure that our packaging engineers understand this area and that we can upskill them to understand better what they need to design ... We’re not there yet.”

E-commerce packaging is “really the first impression, that first moment of truth” for the consumer, Appendini said, referencing the heightened importance of a consumer’s unboxing experience. Impressions of packaging also matter during consumers’ online searches, such as through appearance and messaging.

“It's important to understand the shopper experiences during the search and discovery of items online, and how can we help shoppers through our packaging designs to make the final decision of purchasing,” she said. “Pay attention to the packaging, because consumers do pay attention.”

A broad challenge is: “As we develop that very consumer-centric portfolio, how do we develop it in a way that it's flexible and scalable?” Appendini said. And while brands aren’t constrained by shelf space like in physical stores, other factors can limit their packaging decisions for e-commerce.

For instance, the rise of automation means more e-commerce fulfillment is being done by robot pickers. But some of those machines don’t have the light touch needed to handle conventional plastic film candy wrappers, which could result in breakage and wasted product spilling onto the fulfillment line. Another consideration is how to ship temperature-sensitive products like chocolate to a consumer without traditional cold-chain packaging.

Appendini pointed to research showing that consumers prefer plastic packaging because of the impression that it’s “more robust and providing better life and keeping the product fresh.” So if Mars Wrigley wishes to boost sustainability by making a substrate switch to fiber, it must overcome the challenge of changing consumer perceptions and preferences. 

Nestlé

Nestlé has put a lot of time into optimizing packaging for its premium water brands, such as Perrier and San Pellegrino, to work in the e-commerce environment.

When the products arrive in the United States from Italy and France, they must be repackaged to specifications for different retail scenarios, such as store shelves or e-commerce — especially to be compatible with the growing practice of “ships in own container.” Nestlé’s work on co-packing for SIOC has stopped and started several times since 2019, in part due to the pandemic, said Russ Beadle, a co-manufacturing manager at Nestlé, but also to comply with Amazon’s requirements and fees.

Nestlé reworked aspects of its shipping packaging for its premium waters to avoid Amazon’s fees, such as for repackaging products over a certain weight.  

“Amazon is 82% of our e-commerce sales altogether for premium water, and they are our number seven customer overall for premium water,” so catering to their marketplace is important, Beadle said. “So instead of having Amazon box those up as they get the orders, we’re doing it in mass production at our co-packers and sending [Amazon] the pallets [of water] already in SIOC containers.”

It took Nestlé three months to develop packaging for five SKUs that it took to market through Amazon. The e-commerce giant provided help along the way. “We took advantage of their certified testing labs,” Beadle said.

The brand focused on factors such as designing the cardboard SIOC packaging so consumers can easily grab handles on the sides and lift the heavy box. It also tweaked the gluing and taping process. It harmonized the production processes so they could be performed at all of the different co-packaging facilities. And a big change is that “we no longer do glass [bottles] in e-commerce” due to the initial 60% failure rate for shipping that material, Beadle said, referencing a change to PET bottles.

Clorox

E-commerce dynamics “really changed” post-COVID, in terms of “how we had to rethink our packaging design and our product design,” said Mark Pszczolkowski, principal R&D scientist at The Clorox Co.

During the pandemic, people began buying large quantities of the company’s cleaning products online, so Clorox had to factor in shipping conditions and regulations that it previously didn’t consider as much when consumer purchases primarily occurred in brick-and-mortar stores. The pandemic and the supply chain snarls that followed underscored the importance of thinking about design from the start.

One example is designing robust spray nozzles that don’t break or leak in transit. And Clorox’s push toward reusable, refillable containers presents design challenges: The size of the container and instructions on the concentrated refills that the consumers mix with water have to be just right, because “we're also turning consumers into a little bit of a mixologist at home,” said Pszczolkowski.

The company looks at sustainability holistically. Only taking into consideration one or two design aspects could result in “something that’s e-commerce ready, but it’s not meeting my other requirements. So we have to think about the holistic value chain,” he said.

For instance, incorporating postconsumer recycled content into the packaging for Clorox cleaners is difficult due to the chemicals’ reactivity with different materials.

“We have to look at the chemical compatibility of every grade of PCR on a lot by lot basis to see if it's going to work,” Pszczolkowski said. Some grades of PCR, or even small amounts of contamination in the recycled resin, may make a container more rigid, which affects how the product flows or oozes out and how caps seal onto the container. And PCR can affect certain containers’ child-resistance properties, “so when you add PCR to those types of materials, that's effectively an entirely new child-resistant qualification,” he said.

In addition, the increase in big box stores like Walmart fulfilling orders from their backrooms is changing the packaging landscape.

“I can design something for e-commerce readily today in its own specialized format,” Pszczolkowski said. “But when someone from Walmart can pull it off a shelf,” that alters what goes into the design and requires designing for the future,” not just the present.

Amazon released its first companywide waste and landfill diversion metrics last week, part of its ongoing sustainability efforts meant to cut waste in every sector of its business. 

“We see waste as a defect, and we want to reduce it as much as possible,” said Justine Mahler, director of waste, water and biodiversity at Amazon. 

In 2024, Amazon’s landfill diversion rate was 85%, up from 84% in 2023 and 82% in 2022, the company says. Its overall waste diversion rate was 83%, up from 82% in 2023 and 79% in 2022. The company has not stated a goal for overall landfill or waste diversion.

Amazon estimates 83% of its waste in 2024 was recycled or composted, and 2% of its waste was incinerated “with energy recovery,” according to a statement.

Amazon’s broader sustainability and waste reduction efforts have been in the spotlight in the last few years. That’s due part to the company’s name recognition as well as consumer pressure and shareholder resolutions urging the company to do more to reduce its environmental footprint.

Amazon has invested in recycling technology to help achieve some of these goals. Most recently, it partnered with AI-enabled robotics sorting company Glacier to assess the company’s waste streams and pilot Oscar Sort technology to help customers at Amazon Fresh stores correctly sort waste.

Mahler spoke with Waste Dive about the company’s latest recycling and waste diversion work, including packaging reduction efforts, food waste recovery programs that divert good-to-eat food to donation portals and switching to reusable pallets and other durable goods to reduce waste at fulfillment centers. 

“One of the cool things about my job is the complexity, which creates a real challenge, right? We’re trying to find recycling streams for chip bags, cigarette butts at fulfillment centers, conveyor belts and servers for AWS data centers. There's so many different ways that we're attacking this problem across many different material streams, many different waste streams. The opportunities make it really, really exciting.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
 

Amazon recently announced its latest waste diversion and landfill diversion metrics, which encompass all of Amazon’s operations around the world. How does the company track and measure waste for operations on such a large scale?

What's really important is figuring out how we define waste to begin with, and how we think about this ecosystem. Broadly speaking, we define waste as any material that is discarded as a result of our direct operation. That can include everything from our fulfillment centers to our Whole Foods Market stores to our data centers as part of AWS as well as our corporate buildings that house our employees. 

We've made a pretty substantial investment to measure our waste at the site level so that we can drive action. We work with over 300 partners that disposition our waste in some capacity. We work with them on not only the operational practices, but the reporting practices, to be able to measure our waste and provide that feedback loop so that we could also have a baseline of our waste use, and also be able to drive improvements year over year.

We invest in software systems and data systems that ingest that information. It brings the data from our waste management suppliers and aggregates information to our different businesses so that we can drive targeted actions. It's really, really important for us to be able to have the level of granularity to be able to drive action.

For the waste and recycling industry, gleaning data from AI-enabled sorting equipment is becoming a big part of operations. Amazon has also recently adopted some similar technology through partnerships with Glacier and Oscar Sort, for example. How does Amazon determine which of these technologies to pursue?

Data management is a big focus for us, and we regularly audit our waste management suppliers for their reporting practices and the accuracy of their data. But the reality is that we need breakthroughs in technology like Glacier that can do this work at greater scale and with greater accuracy. 

We want to reduce the amount of contamination that's in waste streams, and so having technology that can more easily identify different material types and pull those out is extremely critical. Upstream, we also want to determine how to fundamentally reduce contamination, or improve sortation processes so that we're not doing as much of that manually. 

One of the biggest challenges around sorting is that people need to have a level of knowledge that they sometimes just don't have. The classic example is a cup that looks like it's paper, but it might have a particular coating on it that makes it not recyclable. That's been the challenge of any cafeteria, canteen, office space: What bin do I put it in? 

You could imagine a type of technology being deployed in employee cafeterias to reduce that cognitive load and make it super seamless. That also goes for a customer at a store or an employee in a fulfillment center. All of those benefits could be realized by this technology. 

In the U.S., recent state laws for extended producer responsibility and food waste diversion are prompting some companies and businesses to change their operations. What impact do these policies have on how Amazon operates?

EPR has been a very steep schema in Europe for quite some time, so we're very experienced on the EPR front as it relates to Amazon’s packaging and reporting on that. The policy environment is very much active at the state level as it relates to EPR in North America. A lot of our packaging efforts — like eliminating packaging or optimizing for paper packaging over plastic where possible — generally aligns with the EPR scheme of reducing the fees and driving toward more recyclability.

Meanwhile, grocery is a very, very important business to Amazon, whether it's Whole Foods Market or our Amazon Fresh offerings. We do have the public commitment to reduce food waste by 50% by 2030. Food waste is always very challenging. 

In the waste hierarchy, you want to prevent it from even happening, right? We're constantly trying to optimize the amount of inventory that we have, to make sure that we've got the right amount to match customer demand, but not in excess that could potentially drive waste.

When we do generate waste, we focus on increasing our composting services, as well as food donations. Last year, across our grocery businesses, we donated the equivalent of 81 million meals that would have alternatively gone to waste. In our online marketplace, we donated the equivalent of 58 million meals in 2024.

Amazon has also been on a multiyear path to update packaging to be more recyclable and move away from plastic where possible. Amazon has reported both some successes and some stumbling blocks in this realm. What’s the latest on those goals? 

We are continuing to make progress on both reduction in total material, but also a focus on transitioning to paper over plastic wherever possible. Our latest lineup of new Kindle devices was largely in paper packaging with a very intentional branded aesthetic that moves away from the high-sheen paperboard to a natural kraft, which is even better from a recycling perspective. 

We're partnering with all aspects of our private brands to identify where there's paper packaging alternatives, but a lot of our grocery products are still in plastic packaging, primarily because paper isn't suitable yet to meet the food safety and shelf life requirements. So there are some more inherent challenges in that space. 

We're not going to compromise safety of the product just for the purpose of moving out of plastic. But that's also why we've made some significant investments and looking at potentially biobased plastics that can also be curbside recyclable.

The general tenet is we want customers to be able to curbside recycle their packaging. There’s a challenge within film plastics right now where there’s not a lot of options for that. We're making some transitions out of plastic, but there's some real technical challenges. That’s why we're investing both in plastic reduction, but also in enhancing plastics so that they have the same characteristics that people like about paper, which is that it's recyclable.