The drive towards more sustainable packaging is transforming the food and beverage industry. As manufacturers replace traditional materials with lighter, recycled and fibre-based alternatives, they must balance environmental ambitions with the need to protect products, maintain production efficiency and meet increasingly stringent quality standards. Steve Davis, global director of product management at Industrial Physics, explores why testing has become essential to reducing risk, ensuring consistency and enabling manufacturers to innovate with confidence.

Across the food and beverage sector, packaging is being asked to do more than ever before. It must preserve product quality, extend shelf life and maintain safety across complex supply chains, while meeting ambitious sustainability targets.

This shift is changing the role packaging plays in production. The question is no longer whether a material is recyclable or renewable, but whether it can consistently deliver the performance required in real-world conditions. As sustainability strategies accelerate, packaging is becoming as much a performance challenge as it is an environmental one.

For manufacturers, this introduces a new kind of risk. When packaging performance becomes less predictable, small variations can directly affect product integrity, operational efficiency and brand reputation.

From material choice to product protection

In food and beverage applications, packaging is not an isolated component; it is integral to product delivery. It must maintain barrier performance, ensure seal integrity and withstand the mechanical stresses of filling, transport and storage.

Historically, conventional materials such as plastics have been optimised over decades to deliver consistent results across these conditions. Today, however, the introduction of new materials such as paper-based alternatives, higher recycled content and lightweighting strategies is changing how packaging behaves.

It is important to recognise that paper is not a single, uniform material but a diverse group influenced by fibre source, processing methods, coatings and additives. When recycled content is introduced, variability increases further.

Differences in fibre length, contamination levels and residual inks or adhesives can significantly affect mechanical and surface properties. As a result, packaging that performs well in development may behave unpredictably in production or distribution. This is the core challenge: sustainable materials can meet performance requirements, but with a narrower margin for error.

In practical terms, performance is no longer guaranteed by material selection alone. It must be actively verified.

Understanding performance in practice

For food and beverage manufacturers, the key question is not how a material performs in isolation, but how it behaves in contact with the product and throughout its lifecycle.

Small changes in packaging performance can have disproportionate effects. Variations in barrier properties can influence oxygen ingress or moisture transfer, affecting freshness and shelf life. In carbonated beverages, minor inconsistencies in strength and sealing can impact pressure retention. In chilled or temperature-sensitive products, packaging must maintain integrity despite environmental fluctuations.

These are not hypothetical concerns. In high-speed production environments, even slight deviations can scale quickly into large volumes of compromised product, increasing the risk of waste or recalls. The challenge is not simply adopting more sustainable materials, but ensuring they perform reliably under real-world conditions.

The limits of traditional quality checks

Traditional quality control methods remain critical. Periodic sampling and laboratory-based testing provide highly accurate, standards-aligned measurements that underpin quality assurance and compliance.

However, as production speeds increase and materials evolve, these approaches are difficult to rely on in isolation. Sampling provides a snapshot, although it may not capture short-term variations or process drift. In high-speed production environments, timing becomes as important as accuracy. By the time an issue is detected through end-of-line testing, it may already have affected significant production volumes.

This does not diminish established methods but highlights the need to complement them with greater visibility into how performance evolves over time.

Connecting measurement to performance

To address this challenge, manufacturers are adopting more connected approaches to testing and quality control.

Rather than treating measurements as isolated data points, connected systems link results across tests and align them with production conditions. This helps build a clearer picture of how performance is influenced by material characteristics and process variables.

For example, seal strength can be correlated with dwell times or temperature profiles. Barrier performance can be assessed alongside material thickness or coating consistency. Dimensional characteristics can be linked to mechanical performance, such as pressure resistance or compression.

This type of insight enables manufacturers to move beyond pass/fail assessments and understand the underlying drivers of performance. It also supports more targeted process optimisation, helping to maintain consistency even as materials and formats evolve.

Closing the performance gap

Sustainability will continue to reshape packaging, but its success depends on performance. Materials must not only meet environmental criteria, but deliver consistent, reliable protection.

Closing this gap requires a shift in how packaging is evaluated – from a focus on material properties alone, to a broader understanding of performance in practice. Testing is no longer a supporting function. It is a critical enabler of product quality, operational efficiency and brand trust.

For food and beverage manufacturers, sustainability ambitions must be matched with robust, data-driven testing strategies that ensure packaging performs as intended, every time and at scale.