The future of food packaging

24-Mar-2021 - Finland

With 100 years of history and a solid Nordic heritage, today Huhtamaki is a key global player in food on-the-go and food on-the-shelf packaging solutions. We have delivered strong growth over the past years, building a global reach with a solid foundation for the future. Our world, however, is changing rapidly. Powerful trends in sustainability, digitalization, personalization of consumer offerings and growth of a strong middle class in Asia, are transforming our operating environment.

Our size and global reach, coupled with high growth ambition, gives us a unique opportunity to become a trailblazer amidst this exciting industry transformation. We renewed our holistic long-term 2030 Strategy a year ago, in March 2020, taking a daring enterprise-wide perspective and setting an ambitious agenda of growth, competitiveness, talent development and sustainability.

Multiple initiatives have been initiated to implement our 2030 Strategy, rapidly building strong momentum despite the challenges of the worldwide pandemic. Amongst such initiatives is our World Class Management (WCM) program, launched to transform our performance in areas of highest business impact. The WCM covers seven areas critical for our long-term success: digitalization, innovation, operations, sales, sourcing and working capital, sustainability, and people and safety. The program has allowed us to create organic communities across our organization to promote the sharing of ideas, best practices and experiences, while focusing on most significant transformational initiatives with ambitious targets.

It is often said that even the best plans rarely survive contact with reality. As the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, we had to ask ourselves the hard question of whether the priorities and strategic course we had laid out are still valid. The pandemic year has proven that the fundamentals on which our strategy is built are solid and robust. Sustainability, digitalization and the rise of Asia not only remain valid in the context of the pandemic and post-pandemic world, but are accelerating, continuing to provide exciting opportunities for Huhtamaki. Moreover, the need for health and safety, and the importance of packaging in assuring this, have increased. The pandemic further raised the importance of digital-enabled business models in securing robustness of our value chains, making our operations more competitive, reshaping the way we do business with our customers and driving growth.

Our entrepreneurial roots and global reach will allow us to thrive and remain competitive in our changing industry. We continue to innovate and reinvent ourselves – new applications, new technologies, new business models for sustainable packaging and circularity. Our future is smart packaging, providing consumer comfort and engagement, product safety and traceability, responsible and efficient end-of-life management. Our bias for action, low hierarchy, passion for results, ability to listen to customers, understand consumers and react and innovate for their needs, set us on the path to reach new heights. In our changing society, building on our strong legacy of responsibility and result delivery, we believe in the great value of sustainable packaging.

https://www.yumda.com/en/news/1170402/the-future-of-food-packaging.html