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40% reduction of packaging weight in the Food & Beverage industry

Teaming up with the R&D and Marketing department, Stim explored breakthrough solutions to reduce the weight per unit of beverage packaging to meet upcoming environmental standards and taxation imposed on this industry.

Develop packaging solutions to meet upcoming environmental demands regarding packaging carbon footprint

The Food & Beverage industry is facing an increasingly strong push to adopt more sustainable initiatives and to reduce its environmental impacts, both from the production and consumption end: new environmental standards and taxation, updated packaging specifications from clients (BtoB), and new demands coming from rising environmental awareness (BtoBtoC).

On the other hand, technologies used for beverage packaging remained unchanged for decades and are highly capital-intensive. The R&D and innovation team, therefore, has been struggling to imagine and develop breakthrough solutions, with reasonings such as "it is technically impossible” or “it would be too costly to change”...These fixations in innovation design, as well as industrial and financial constraints, led the team to a dead-end in their exploration of new concepts. 

Stim took on the challenge with the R&D Director to propose radically new packaging solutions, in order for the company stays ahead in this sustainable transition.

Six solutions with new values, designs, materials, and processes to reduce the packaging weight by 40%

In collaboration with the R&D and Innovation Director, Stim implemented a four-phase mission : 

  • An extensive analysis of the evolution of packaging to define the gap between the upcoming challenges and the current innovation roadmap of the company. This helped reveal blind spots in their innovation strategy and investments.

  • A two-month exploration program based on the C-K methodology to explore and design new solutions, in collaboration with the company’s experts. 15 breakthrough concepts were proposed at the end of this phase.

  • A one-month program to structure the exploration of the six most promising solutions, ranging from 30% to 40% of weight reduction potential

  • A six-month experimentation to test five out of these six solutions

In nine months, the company went from a dead-end to concrete disruptive solutions regarding packaging weight reduction. Two of them will be launched in production, only 24 months after the start of the exploration program with Stim.

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