Comment
The packaging behind the perfect snack
By Simon Buswell, sales & marketing director, Eco Flexibles
how much now rides on it. T
Mintel’s ‘The Connection Economy’ explores how snacking is fragmenting into distinct occasions, from the commute and the desk- drawer emergency to the post-gym boost and the film night, with each occasion carrying its own expectations. Simultaneously, selective spending means every pack must justify itself in a fraction of a second.
A single snack pack is now tasked with doing an awful lot at once. It must communicate its occasion through print and shelf standout. It must deliver convenience, with clean opening, secure reclose and a format built around portion control and freshness. It must protect the product with the right barrier performance, puncture resistance and seal integrity. And, increasingly, it must be recyclable in existing waste streams. These requirements result in a set of demands that are often pulling in different directions. Reconciling them is the job of the converter, not the brand. These demands are amplified by
sustainability needs, but this is an area where packaging design expertise makes a difference. Recyclability and performance stop being opposing forces the moment they are engineered together from the outset.
A carefully designed mono-material can carry functional fin seals, tear notches and reclose
he snack aisle has always been a battleground of fighting for consumer attention and snap purchase decisions, but what has changed is
features while still meeting OPRL guidance for mechanical recycling. Pair that structure with water-based digital print and a brand keeps high-definition graphics without solvent VOCs or long lead times. Specification, testing and accreditation are handled as one exercise, so the pack is validated against the product rather than chosen as a sustainability tick-box. The commercial case closely mirrors the technical one. For Whitworths Fusions, a range of fruit and nut snack products, we built a high- barrier mono-PP pouch with inverted stabilo format and extended fin seal giving a clean, repeatable opening with no tearing through the pack, alongside standout shelf presence. In another example, for high-protein brand Taste Original, moving from a plain lidding film and label to a fully printed mono-material design across lidding and bags helped deliver a 15
per cent uplift in food-to-go sales. That figure should matter to converters just as much as to brands, because it is evidence that what we make drives how a product performs, not merely whether it complies.
In many ways, the snack packaging
category is a proving ground. Nowhere else do shelf appeal, functionality, protection and recyclability collide so tightly in packs bought and eaten within minutes and priced to the penny. Getting all four into one recyclable structure is genuinely difficult, which is precisely why it is worth doing well.
It also changes what a packaging converter is for. When every demand combines on a single pack, the brand no longer wants simply a supplier of flexible packaging; it wants a partner who can integrate design, material science, print and testing under one roof and eliminate the need for trade-offs. In the hyper- competitive snack aisle, that is the difference between selling packaging and engineering a product’s competitive edge, and it is the role our industry should be stepping into.
32
September 2026
www.convertermag.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42
