The sourcing of packaging is no longer just a technical procurement decision, but a strategic one. The pressures converging on the food packaging industry right now, from tightening regulation and consumer scrutiny to rapid advances in technology, are accelerating.

That conviction is what led the packaging company to bring together voices from across the value chain for its ‘Inside the Future of Food Packaging’ event, held at the Silverstone motor racing circuit recently. Retailers, recyclers, technology providers and manufacturers all joined the conversation on how the industry can adapt to evolving sustainability regulations while maintaining performance, shelf appeal and commercial viability.

Discussions ranged from extended producer responsibility (EPR) and the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) to consumer recycling behaviour, soft plastics, and the growing role of AI on the factory floor and in packaging design. While each topic considered a different challenge, a consistent theme emerged: the need for greater clarity, collaboration, and data-driven decision-making across the entire packaging ecosystem.

As kp president of food packaging, Thomas Jakobsen, said, “Packaging today is no longer simply about containment or protection. It is about balancing increasingly complex demands, performance, sustainability, compliance and cost, often under tighter timelines and greater scrutiny than ever before. In a world where volatility is increasingly the new constant, working in isolation is not an option.”

Packaging isn’t ‘just’ packaging

The strongest overarching theme of the day was that food packaging is being pulled in multiple directions at once. Performance, sustainability, compliance, cost, recyclability, recovery infrastructure, and consumer trust are all essential considerations. During the event, speaker after speaker reinforced how the role of packaging has evolved into something that helps food businesses make confident decisions under greater scrutiny and tighter timelines.

Consumer trust

The time when packaging was a supporting player is in the past; it’s now a headline act. This was evidenced by James Piper of the Talking Rubbish podcast, whose talk at the event focused on packaging communication as a live public issue. Talking Rubbish’s audience demonstrates this clearly, showing that consumers are highly engaged, although they are often sceptical, confused, and quick to challenge claims. The podcast’s reported 250,000 downloads, 400-person Discord community, 91 per cent average episode completion, and 10 million social media views show that recycling and packaging can generate sustained attention when explained accessibly both inside and outside the industry.

Piper highlighted confusion around QR codes, Deposit Return Schemes (DRS) policies, and generic or misleading recycling claims to illustrate that the industry has a tendency to make things complex when what consumers really want is clarity. Technical proof points have to be presented in context and communicated effectively to appeal to modern consumers.

For example, he discussed the gap between recycling data and public-facing recycling claims. Campaigns that count individual plastic items rather than weighing them are unhelpful, because they can count a crisp packet and a plastic bottle equally, even though they represent very different amounts of material. Communications need a consistently clear approach when making claims and applying data.

Regulations are evolving

Recently, a coalition of more than 200 companies signed a letter urging the EU not to reopen the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) and to implement it efficiently. This only reinforces the fact that the issue of regulations is a live and still evolving one.

Unsurprisingly, PPWR and EPR reforms were a key topic of discussion at the event. Denise Mathieson, head of packaging innovation and programme delivery at the UK’s Waitrose & Partners supermarket, suggested that the raft of new compliance standards created a balancing act that many businesses are still unprepared for. While the focus on EPR is welcome, Mathieson argued that the same focus should be applied to PPWR, given its far-reaching impact on issues like PET recycling.

Piper also made this argument, using baked beans as an example of how it could affect a staple food item. He compared the cost of packaging a thousand beans in plastic snap pots, steel cans and glass jars. Under the weight-based system of EPR, he estimated this would cost 3p for plastic, 5p for steel, and 13p for glass, illustrating how weight-based legislation may push the market towards lighter formats like plastic, even where recycling infrastructure remains imperfect. This potentially creates a tension with PPWR, which focuses on recyclability, recycled content, and reuse; a tension that can only be solved by focusing on real end-of-life outcomes, not by categorising certain materials as inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

The soft plastics test

Soft plastics are one of the most important topics in the new era of packaging. They offer unparalleled functionality for food processors, they are lightweight and easy to transport, and they are highly durable and proven to limit food waste. However, they still pose challenges in recycling – challenges that are only growing more pressing with the advent of PPWR.

Addressing these matters requires close collaboration between packaging suppliers like kp and retailers, and this was a key theme of the event. The packaging industry and retailers can introduce change individually, but working together is the only way to make it stick.

The ‘Inside the Future of Food Packaging’ event covered many case studies that demonstrated how this kind of collaboration can drive real progress. For example, Tesco’s ‘Bring Back’ trial; partnerships with Plastic Energy and SABIC; customer-returned soft plastics being used in cheese wrap, and later moved towards mono-material solutions when chemical recycling proved too costly and complex.

Progress on soft plastics will not come from packaging developers working alone; it will come from co-developing solutions with the retailers and processors who understand what recovery infrastructure can realistically handle.

AI ambition into reality

Waste management has historically been a physical infrastructure challenge. Increasingly though, it’s also a digital one, in the form of AI, automation, and smart solutions. The businesses best positioned for success are already working towards this digital-focused future.

Yaseed Chaumoo, managing director of Greyparrot, took to the stage to unpack some of the questions facing packaging, discussing how AI can be used to support packaging circularity. Deepnest is an AI-powered tool that uses Greyparrot’s global AI waste analytics network to track billions of waste objects every year.

This presentation underlined the power AI has when used intelligently across the packaging life cycle. In the case of Deepnest, it can break down packaging items into individual components and evaluate these components against metrics like sortability, contamination rate, volume, fee exposure and more. This enables designers to model how swapping out a bottle cap or a sleeve, for example, might impact recycling outcomes and costs across various markets.

This doesn’t necessarily have to result in sweeping changes to packaging design. Brands can use tools like Deepnest to make intelligent, targeted, incremental adjustments that balance consumer preferences with retailer and regulatory requirements.

Yaseed used the example of a sleeve on a PET bottle to illustrate this. Deepnest’s tool reveals that plastic bottles with full sleeves are three times more likely to end up in landfill or incineration. Identifying this problem means that businesses still using full sleeves can address the issue by shifting to removable sleeves, smaller sleeves, or no sleeves at all.

Another AI-focused highlight of the event was a presentation from Sean Maley, regional sales manager (Europe) at industrial AI expert Infinite Uptime. This session explored a different use case for AI: operational efficiency on the factory floor.

Prescriptive AI on the factory floor can detect equipment problems before failures occur, giving plant teams a single recommendation that explains what is wrong, why it is happening, and what action to take. This presentation provided a number of useful insights by grounding AI in practical outcomes: reduced downtime, fewer missed customer commitments, less pressure on stretched maintenance teams, and better management of ageing equipment.

The distinction between predictive and prescriptive is an important detail. Predictive AI may tell teams something is wrong; prescriptive AI is positioned as telling them what to do next. That is crucial, and Maley noted that Infinite Uptime’s approach relies on more than dashboards. It uses reliability engineers, process experts, failure-mode knowledge, vibration data, PLC/DCS/SCADA inputs, and customer-validated feedback loops to create a living system that turns the data from those dashboards into measurable action.

The connection

Bringing together perspectives from across retail, recycling, technology, manufacturing and packaging design was a deliberate choice. Because the challenges ahead, from EPR and PPWR to soft plastics, AI and real-world recyclability, cannot be solved in isolation. They require open, evidence-led dialogue. Jakobsen concluded the event, saying, “The biggest opportunity for us is that our customers don’t know everything we can do for them, and it is super exciting to have an opportunity like today, where we can give some insight and really interact with our customers about the industry.”

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