Question MF

Due to Covid, All4Pack 2020 will not take place this year, can we have a few words about the forces that would have made the show a success? How to capitalize on them to conceive virtual events in November despite everything? What will be the dates for 2022?

Answer OM 

Without containers, food safety, consumption and distribution of foods would simply be impossible. But beyond this main role, the packaging sector keeps changing to preserve our resources and our planet, within a restrictive legal framework. Therefore, packaging needs to be reinvented.

As a pioneer of all sustainable packaging and intra-logistics solutions, ALL4PACK 2020’s mission was to support professionals in facing this unprecedented revolution, by devoting itself to sustainable development and to the packaging of the future, in terms of specific, sustainable and responsible solutions for packaging, or in terms of the choice of tailor-made and/or high-performance solutions for processing, printing or logistics.

We had also planned to publish a white paper, ‘The Packaging Revolution, First Period, The Emergence of New Solutions’, which we plan to present during a webinar at the end of next November on the dates when ALL4PACK should have been held.

Question OM

As a result, the French Packaging Council will not be able to organize its 4th European round table on eco-design. Depending on the health situation, how will the Council deliver its messages? In these conditions, how do you manage to foster collective intelligence and organize events?

Answer MF

In the short term, the Covid-19 crisis combines two difficulties: workers legitimately fear for themselves and their relatives, and companies focus on their own resilience. As a result, getting everyone in a collective effort has been, and still is, very hard. We can especially see that in the limited number of participants in our group sessions in 2020.  This constraint should make us creative and the Council is imagining new ways of collaboration and expression. The cancelation of this year All4Pack only increases the urgency to find new solutions.

Question MF

As you write it, a new era is dawning and All4Pack’s mission, despite the cancellation of the exhibition, is to accompany professionals in facing an unprecedented revolution. The French Packaging Council works on Fair Packaging while All4Pack offers a Zero Impact vision, how to make these two notions converge so marketers can find their way around?

Answer OM 

Fair packaging and zero-impact packaging are not conflicting. Quite the contrary.

We had indeed planned to focus on zero-impact packaging through a discussion bringing together eco-responsible and committed stakeholders, actors of change who will provide innovative and agile solutions for packaging: innovative start-ups et young companies committed to the environmental challenges of the packaging industry.

Our goal, through this exchange session, was to ask questions, to propose solutions, to co-build the future with marketers, manufacturers and committed players in order to provide an accurate view of tomorrow’s packaging, by responding to the challenges and questions of industrialists and consumers. This is above all the role of the exhibition and its mainspring. We will carry on with the French Packaging Council between now and the next edition, scheduled for November 2022.

Question OM

Due to special circumstances, the packaging industry has had to come forward with lockdown because “no packaging means no product”. Will the Council use this fact to show that packaging is part of the daily life of the consumer, of the citizen?

Answer MF (GT Why/conference)

I won’t call it a divine surprise, but when the government realized that food and health packaging were also part of the “essential”, we were reassured. Too often, NGOs, media and public authorities have an unfortunate tendency to talk only about the empty packaging that needs to be eradicated. To use a metaphor, we suddenly moved from the waste section of the Ministry of the Environment to the Industry section at Bercy [Ministry of the Economy and Finance]. It is up to us to bounce back quickly to capitalize on this recognition. We are working on this with the machine industry, which is highly complementary to packaging. This complementarity is so obvious, in fact, that All4Pack has been associating them in the same exhibition for a long time.

Question MF

All4Pack carried out an IFOP (French institute of public opinion) survey on sustainable packaging, carried out after lockdown, what are the main conclusions to be drawn from this?

Answer OM

According to the IFOP study, which was carried out on a representative sample of 1,001 people, the majority of French people find packaging to be extremely useful or very useful. This proportion is higher among seniors (66% compared to 22% among 18-24-year old’s), a sort of large generational perception gap.

If, as professionals, we understand packaging plays an essential role in the safety of products and therefore of consumers, French people seem to be clearly aware of this too. And even more since the crisis. However, this usefulness comes up against a strong and lasting societal desire for change in the design and use of packaging to better address environmental issues and challenges. Thus, 1/3 of the French preferred to buy products with less packaging before the Covid-19 and 60% still think the same despite the health crisis.

This Covid-19 pandemic will leave its mark on changing consumer behavior, highlighting the impact on food safety. Although 60% of those surveyed say they have not changed their behavior about packaging, 40% say they now buy more products with packaging since the Covid-19 health crisis. They are even more numerous to make this choice in the North-East regions (48%) and large conurbations (45%) where the spread of the virus has been greater.

The results of the survey also demonstrate that a large majority of French people (61%) consider that manufacturers do not make enough effort in designing sustainable packaging. However, there is no “penalty rating” from consumers (the extreme negative value is only at 17%).

Packaging still has a bright future ahead of it!

Question OM

We are almost at the end of 2020, what are the projects the Council is working on? and how can All4Pack contribute?

Answer MF

As planned in our roadmap, we are still using our group sessions to illustrate the functionalities of the packaging in a very practical way. Health, hygiene, safety, process… In the background, there is nothing new because we already wrote everything down. On the form on the other hand, we rely on a very didactic and imaginative angle to make our teaching methods even more effective. We know that All4Pack and Fabrice Peltier had prepared a great work on the future of packaging. We look forward to seeing the contents of this work to further enhance our approach.