In any industry, you know what can happen when your sales and marketing
departments are not on the same page
as your manufacturing and operations.
Robert Pierson encountered this type of
disconnect at a chicken processing company in Northern Ireland.
“A supermarket chain wanted to buy
chicken from the processor, but the market had very expensive packaging
requirements,” he says. “Their salespeople had agreed to material requirements
for the packaging that they didn’t really
understand. So it ended up not being
nearly as profitable as it would have been
if they had understood the cost of the
packaging.”
As chair of the department of food science and management at Delaware Valley
College, Pierson has developed a certificate program in packaging that fills the
void of college-level packaging courses
that are available online.
Smart Business spoke with Pierson
about how the industry is changing and
how you can adapt to keep up.
How can learning about packaging benefit
business owners?
It’s an inexpensive way to educate your
staff so all the parts of your company
work together and save a lot of money.
If you go into an average supermarket,
there are about 10,000 items on the
shelves. Every one of those has packaging
and a series of people involved in the
packaging of it. There is the design of the
box, the design of the product, the safety
of the product, the shelf life of the product, how the product fits into a box, how
the box fits into a case, how that case fits
into a pallet and how we get it from here
to there safely, without all the potato
chips getting crushed.
Say you’ve designed these great containers, but you can only fit four in a case. To
ship a pallet costs a fortune because the
product is not an efficient shape to ship
maximum quantities or there is too much
breakage from one point to the other. If
you are aware of this ahead of time, you
either work with everyone to make sure it
happens right or you don’t make the product at all because it’s not practical. You
can have the greatest product in the
world, but if you can’t get it from here to
there, what good is it?
Understanding the packaging process
and that relationship between marketing
and manufacturing solves a lot of
problems.
How are recent changes affecting the packaging industry?
We’ve seen a lot of innovations in the
food and pharmaceutical areas. Traceability is where you’re seeing the most
changes, because of today’s concern with
food safety. They have technologies today
that can label foods with edible micro-tags. You can scan a bag of lettuce and
know exactly what part of the field it was
harvested from.
Many companies are going beyond the
government’s regulations. For example,
Wal-Mart wants to implant radio frequency chips on every product. This would
allow them to track products so they can
tell exactly where their inventory is at all
times.
Basically, you could get in line at Wal-Mart and they could just scan the radio
frequency of the items. You wouldn’t even
have to unload your cart. Just fill up your
bags and walk through and it will tell you
how much your items cost. I think that’s
something you’re going to see within the
next four or five years.
There are many different devices to
coordinate traceability, and one benefit is
cutting down on store theft. You used to
have a big, clunky device that they would
deactivate for you in the store. The new
anti-theft devices remain in place for the
life of the product. If thieves can’t remove
the devices, shoplifting goes down pretty
dramatically.
How are changes in the industry making an
impact on safety and environmental issues?
You see the importance of environmental issues every day. Bottled water, for
example, has become very popular. It’s
pure profit. So companies put that money
in the packaging. You’re seeing the
reverse of that lately. Companies like
Pepsi and Coke have the largest market
for bottled water. They own Dasani and
Aquafina, but they also own the small
brands like Deer Park and Poland Springs.
They’re going with packaging that is more
environmentally sound. By using less
plastic in their packaging, they convince
consumers that they could strain the environment a little less by drinking this bottled water as opposed to a competing
brand.
Companies know that environmentally
friendly packaging can also help them cut
costs. If they can save a penny on a bottle,
it doesn’t sound like a lot, but by taking a
little plastic out by re-engineering the
packaging, a company like Aquafina or
Dasani could save millions of dollars a
year.
You need just enough packaging to protect the product and make it attractive
and convenient to consumers. For the
sake of the bottom line and the environment, less packaging is more.
ROBERT PIERSON is the chair of the department of food science and management at Delaware Valley College. Reach him at (215) 489-2474 or [email protected].
