Choice, creation and optimization of packaging

For consumers and industrial companies, packaging is seen as a means to an end, not an end in itself.

A means of containing, protecting, preserving, transferring and transporting, as well as selling, informing and communicating...

Packaging must fulfill these functions by providing service and satisfaction to the various operators in the "packaging chain", who will be :

• the designer/creator ;

• the manufacturer ;

• the industrial user ;

• logistician ;

  the distributor ;

• the end customer ;

• the local authority that will process the waste.

All while minimizing environmental impact, ensuring safety and authenticity and, of course, costing as little as possible.

For an entrepreneur, choosing a packaging solution is no trivial matter. All the more so as the product contained (e.g. solid, liquid, pasty, gaseous, hazardous or non-hazardous...) will differ in its physical, chemical and possibly biological characteristics (e.g. weight, size, texture, fragility, resistance, temperature, ph, permeability...), and the priorities of the various links in the packaging chain, i.e. the operators, will differ.

The choice of packaging is therefore a complex operation, based on the resolution of equations with many unknowns, and this article provides guidelines for an approach that takes account of :

• of the goals pursued by the various operators in the packaging chain from "cradle to grave";

• the current state of knowledge on materials, systems and processes;

• of user appreciation, today ;

• consumer expectations for tomorrow;

• societal developments for the day after tomorrow.

This article does not propose a "good little packer's manual", providing one-size-fits-all, ready-made answers to the questions manufacturers ask themselves when choosing, creating or optimizing their packaging. Such a manual cannot exist.

This is fortunate! Otherwise, all types of comparable products, whether consumer goods or capital goods, would be offered in the same kind of packaging, and freedom of choice and diversity would disappear. The aim here is simply to enable readers to objectify and rationalize the choice they have to make.