Over the decades, the global packaging industry has enjoyed healthy growth, supported by several megatrends. They will continue to shape the business, and we expect that two of them—sustainability and digital (particularly e-commerce)—will create significant challenges for industry leaders, as well as once-in-a-lifetime transformational opportunities.
To understand what lies ahead, we looked back at how the industry has adapted over previous decades. We found that since 2020, there have been three eras, including today’s, stretching into the immediate future. Each era has been characterized by large changes in consumer behavior—changes that brought into existence new packaging products and other innovations that ultimately led to new corporate and value chain structures. Significantly, as these three eras unfolded, the proliferation of digital devices and social media sped up the pace of change and influenced the type of disruption.