After surveying 380 packaging professionals in the food and beverage industry across the UK, United States, Germany, India and Malaysia, research showed that 50% agree that their company’s testing process has changed positively in the past five years. Agreement was even higher among professionals working primarily with organic material (62%) and plastics (56%). 

A key focus of the report was uncovering which testing developments were believed to offer the most opportunity in these industries, with the top five identified as:

1. Automatic process control
2. 100% inspection
3. Non-destructive testing methods
4. In line testing
5. Hand-held testing devices

The top-ranked methods did vary between materials and geographies. However, even in the overall data, over a third of respondents identified opportunities with each testing method, which suggests a considerable appetite for innovation in this part of the process. 

Global Director of Product Management at Industrial Physics, Steve Davis, comments: “Over the past decade, we’ve seen a huge push from many of the big players in the food and beverage packaging markets to increase automation. Automatic process control has many benefits for packaging operations, It not only reduces the need for people to physically move samples to the labs, but also allows information to be shared in real time for a more seamless end-to-end process.”

With a considerable level of change and complexity across the packaging landscape, the research also examined how professionals are navigating the testing environment. 

Over half (57%) believe their company knows where to look for the latest testing developments, but 49% require external support with testing expertise. This supports insight from last year’s report from Industrial Physics which highlighted that 37% of packaging professionals across food and beverage, consumer goods, and medical devices and pharmaceuticals referenced lack of in-house expertise as one of their biggest challenges with testing standards. 

In this year’s research, 47% also shared that they’ve had to delay innovation while they search for an external packaging and material testing expert, with even more (57%) among those working primarily with paper packaging. 

Michael Joseph, Product Manager at Industrial Physics, stated: “Our latest research further highlights that packaging professionals do need more support and expertise to help them take advantage of the right developments that will offer the best value for their business – and prevent delays to innovation projects. 

“However, the value of internal initiatives such as peer-to-peer learning, supplier-led workshops and training documents should not be overlooked as these help to upskill new team members and ensure that the quality of expertise does not change when members retire or leave the industry.”