Clear Cookie Pouches

Pouch forum highlights trends

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. (July 13, 4 p.m. ET) -- Onstage at the Global Pouch Forum in Fort Lauderdale, keynote speaker Dennis Calamusa told a story about trends that drew appreciative chuckles from the audience.

While waiting to speak at another recent packaging conference in Las Vegas, Calamusa, president of Sarasota, Fla.-based consulting group AlliedFlex Technologies Inc., said he’d listened to a stream of presenters discussing the lightweighting of PET rigid packaging.

“When I got up to speak, the only thing I could say was, ‘Guys, if you keep downgauging the bottle, you’re going to turn it into a pouch! I haven’t heard one person talk about up gauging your bottle to make them last more than one [use],’ ” Calamusa said June 8.

While acknowledging that recycling rates of flexible packaging remain low, one of the themes of the Global Pouch Forum, held June 7-9 in Fort Lauderdale, was that pouches — which one presenter termed “the Rodney Dangerfield of packaging” — have more variety and market share than ever before.

That’s thanks in part to breakthrough designs, such as zippered closures that don’t leave a ragged edge when they’re originally torn open, as much as creative printing techniques and improved barrier properties, presenters said.

“For many years, [manufacturers] heard, ‘Cost reduction, cost reduction, cost reduction,’ ” Calamusa said. “Now we’re starting to hear, when it comes to flexible packaging, [that] if we invest in our packaging, it can have a dramatic impact on our sales.”

An electronic instant-polling exercise involving many of the 348 conference attendees conducted by Sal Pellingra, innovation director at Cincinnati-based Ampac Holdings LLC, found that 33 percent of respondents think store-shelf impact of packaging on consumers is the most important consideration for pouches, beating cost and sustainability or environmental concerns.

From the legendary Capri Sun drink pouch mentioned several times at the conference, pouches have been accepted by consumer packaged-goods companies to the extent that pouches now hold products from laundry detergent to wine to microwave entrees, sauces and baby food.

In addition to eye-level appeal, flexible packaging can be marketed to consumers as more eco-friendly than alternatives, speakers said: Pellingra said one truckload of unfilled plastic pouches can contain the same amount of products as 25 truckloads of empty glass jars; Calamusa said it typically takes 10-25 truckloads of rigid packaging to hold as much as one truckload of pouches.

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