As we move ever closer to a new year, it’s time to ask what kinds of trends, priorities and disruptive innovations we can expect 2023 to bring. Dinesh Mungi, packaging expert and branch head, B&R – Pune region, India, speaks about the year that has passed, challenges and the industry’s expectations in 2023.
Manash Das: How has 2022 been for the packaging industry?
Dinesh Mungi: The packaging industry being consumer-driven has seen organic growth – this leads to attracting innovative manufacturing practices and an evolution in packaging techniques too. Steady growth is seen, particularly in the FMCG and cosmetic packaging with OEMs and End Users investing substantial amount to maintain and capture new market areas. Good packaging with pertinent contents and other important information mentioned on the label has seen a major acceptability to innovative techniques. Thus, this has uplifted a few of the other industry sectors too where packaging plays a major role.
2022 especially has rooted a lot of impact with sustainable packaging, as this is one of the key environmental concerns at present and in the coming years for reducing packaging waste. With a view to elevating manufacturing techniques and processes, adaptive manufacturing is playing a significant role in OEMs’ collaboration with the B&R team to innovate packaging machines and reduce the machine’s footprint while maintaining the required production throughput.
Manash Das: What about the challenges?
Dinesh Mungi: As consumers are increasing, their demands are increasing as well. Today’s consumers search for products that are best suited to their needs or personalized for them. This led to the challenge for manufacturers to produce customized products and that too at higher production speeds than before. It is not feasible to overcome this with already existing setups because of the less flexibility and high changeover times.
Another challenge that is of concern is the packaging waste going to landfills creating environmental issues. The industry is working on major sustainability goals to adapt to environmentally friendly packaging techniques and the process is upgraded to reduce wastage during production.
Manash Das: What can the industry expect in 2023?
Dinesh Mungi: To cater to the market demand by increasing the production rates while keeping sustainable manufacturing practices, the industry will adopt new technologies and innovative products which will make the machines smart and more efficient. Adaptive manufacturing will play a prominent role to enable manufacturers to implement intelligent track technology integrated with robotics, machine vision and digital twins. This will lead the manufacturer to succeed in a world of mass customization, eCommerce, direct-to-consumer and omnichannel strategies.
