Stand-Up Pouches for Food and Beverage Packaging

Consumers’ nomadic life-styles and the growing number of single and senior households favor a trend toward single and small-portion packs. Flexible packaging, especially stand-up pouches constitute the ideal solution.

Stand-up pouches are becoming well established in flexible packaging market. According to a new report from PCI Films Consulting, the U.S. stand-up pouch market has seen dramatic growth over the past five years, increasing by 50 per cent in unit volume terms to approaching 17 billion units in 2013 – and will continue to grow by around seven per cent per annum to reach nearly 24 billion units in 2018, at least twice as fast as volume growth expected in the U.S. flexible packaging market as a whole, according to a new report.

Beverages and pet food are the largest end use categories, the report – by PCI Film Consulting – said, with each accounting for one-third of demand, closely followed by human food applications with around 30 per cent share. According to the report, future increases in volume are expected to come from a wide variety of end uses: frozen foods and fruit compotes, frozen spirits, cocktails, baby food, shredded and diced cheese, laundry and dishwashing refill packs and soups. “Other opportunities are only in the early stages of development but pouches used to pack motor oils, dietary meal solutions and possibly olive oil and fresh vegetables are forecast to grow in volume,” the report said.

The trend toward stand-up pouches packaging has been mainly driven by companies looking for ways to increase shelf appeal and differentiate their products from the competition and add consumer convenience. Stand-up pouches can be used as an additional marketing tool for brand owners looking to boost sales.

From an environmental point of view, pouches are more sustainable than traditional packaging formats (cans, boxes or rigid plastic container). They utilize much less material, improve the product to package ratio and eliminate over packaging and waste. Depending upon the application, pouches can weigh up to 95% less than rigid containers and take up less than 10% of the space typically used by rigid containers. In addition, pouches require much less landfill space than other containers.

In conclusion, stand-up pouches provide form, function and convenience. They are an innovative marketing approach to stimulate the sales of a stagnant brand or increase the acceptance and success of a new product introduction.

This post was originally published at PackAdvisors