After a year of lookbacks, the Flexible Packaging Association (FPA) and its members are concluding the 75th anniversary of the trade organization by looking toward the future.
“We have to lean into the value that flexible packaging brings, and the performance benefits that flexible packaging brings,” says Terry Tucker, polyethylene sales manager, ExxonMobil Product Solutions. “In addition to highlighting and articulating the many benefits that flexible packaging delivers, we should continue to bring innovative solutions to society that improve packaging utility, reduce material consumption, and consider design for recycling.”
From the industry’s birth and through times of transition, FPA has adapted, say longtime members. The unified voice that FPA has provided for 75 years will keep growing as the industry navigates a tumultuous climate and continues its role of providing an essential product for commerce and quality of life, they point out.
Leadership Pipelines
J. Erskine Love, Jr. joined FPA in the early 1960s, only a few years after he founded Printpack in 1956.
“The industry was a very small, emerging industry,” says Love’s son, Printpack Chair and CEO Jimmy Love. “It was natural to start trying to associate with your competitors doing the same things, so you have a single voice about the major issues.”
It was a time when flexible packaging—largely consisting of cellophane—was “mostly a specialty,” Love says. Government and market research data didn’t recognize flexible packaging as a standalone industry. It was seen as “kind of a stepchild to established paper or packaging industries.”
By the 1970s, when polyethylene and polypropylene film options became more prevalent in the industry and “raised the bar in terms of lower cost, improved barrier, lighter weight, and less energy usage,” FPA was positioned to help propel the industry forward, Love says.
His father remained an active member, keeping FPA’s annual meeting on the household calendar. The business contributed a succession of leaders over the years, with Head of Sales David Peake, past Chair and CEO Dennis Love, and Jimmy Love all serving terms as FPA chairs. Today, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer David Love is FPA’s treasurer and an executive committee member.
In the early 2000s, Jimmy Love’s FPA board and chair terms coincided with budget constraints triggered by mergers that shrank FPA’s membership rolls.
The expansion of membership categories to include supporting industries such as film, resin, and ink suppliers also helped replenish the number of members, while retaining the organizational focus on issues facing converters, David Love says.
Technology-forward and innovative associate members, such as ExxonMobil, recognize that the health of the flexible packaging market aligns with their strategic priorities, Tucker says. Industrywide alignment on shared priorities, including minimizing food waste and designing for recyclability, creates a situation where “we can more effectively advocate with a consistent voice.”
“It’s in our best interests that our customers and their customers are successful,” Tucker explains. “Anything we do must be collaborative with the full value chain, including meeting market needs with scalable supply, and offering sustainable solutions like mono-material designs and advanced recycling.”
Windmoeller & Hoelscher Corporation (W&H), a global machinery supplier for flexible packaging, has been an FPA member for 47 years, says President Andrew Wheeler. The company’s first president in the U.S., James Feeney, was an FPA chair, and a representative of W&H has served on the board since.
“There was no doubt that FPA was the biggest and best trade organization in our industry,” Wheeler says.
Coming from his background in sales, he adds, FPA’s networking has been exceptional in its ability to convene decision-makers at its meetings.
“The people who are there are the industry’s current and future decision-makers,” Wheeler says. “I’ve found the level of trust in relationships you can build through FPA is outstanding.”
Unified Voice
Over the decades, FPA has helped members establish their marketing messages and create an industry voice, Jimmy Love points out. Unification and focus help avoid unintended consequences when lawmakers try to solve one problem but, through confusion and mistaken notions over root causes, frequently undermine flexible packaging.
The unified voice is imperative in the age of social media, when soundbites rule and the nuances of complex issues such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and extended producer responsibility (EPR) get lost amid oversimplification and vilification, Jimmy Love adds.
“The wider the group of people who get it, then the more people who understand it, and you can reach out and influence that conversation to make sure you don’t get caught in the crossfire,” he says.
Engagement and input provided by a diverse mix of converters and suppliers on FPA’s board helps the organization chart its course and establish its priorities, David Love says.
“It’s incumbent on each member to speak up about what their biggest challenges are or something they see coming,” he says. “It may be specific to them in their state or local area, but they should raise it to FPA if there’s something that needs to be dealt with at a bigger level.”
In response to EPR legislation, FPA lobbyists initially had to deal with them one-by-one—“whack-a-mole” style—in varied forms across multiple states. FPA solicited member input to create its model legislation, David Love says. As EPR legislation has gained broader traction, that document establishes a foundation for states to begin discussions that include the flexible packaging perspective.
Jimmy Love adds, “If you don’t battle it out at the front of one state, the next state wants to skip the hard part and replicate the regulation that another state had already approved or was considering.”
As Wheeler notes, an association can’t always advocate for or against issues that may impact its diverse members, depending on their business priorities. In those cases, such as tariffs that could be advantageous for some members and harmful for others, FPA gathers updates for the membership and shares information among lawmakers.
“Every year, at least at FPA’s annual meeting, there’s a lot of passion in the room about the value that flexible packaging brings to society,” Wheeler says. “We truly believe our solutions are better than those alternatives, but you’ve got to make sure everyone understands that and has all the information they need to realize that.”
On sustainability issues, FPA has been active in informing members about legislative activity while also being proactive with state governments considering, for example, EPR regulations, says Catherine Mattson, W&H head of marketing communications and sustainability.
“The regular legislative updates are extremely helpful,” she says.
Although the industry “tends to be on the defensive” regarding its benefits, it is the customers of W&H who have been generating sustainability innovations, largely “because it made good business sense, and not because they were trying to kowtow to legislators or follow a regulation,” Wheeler says. “Our customers have made their products thinner, stronger, using less materials, making less of a footprint, reusing, and recycling long before anybody said they had to.”
FPA membership provides “a seat at the table,” Mattson says.
“It’s easy to focus solely on your own part of the value chain,” she says. “Listening to concerns and ideas from others is something I find really important for seeing the big picture.”
Supporting the Mission
And all along, FPA has been leading the conversation to raise awareness about the value of flexible packaging as the safest, most efficient way to prevent spoilage and promote the sustainability of food products, Wheeler says.
“As it has done until now, the innovation in new products and new ways to package are going to come from within the industry,” he says. “They are the most innovative minds who know exactly what is needed.”
FPA’s statistical portraits of food waste versus plastic waste help illuminate the issue, but “real challenges” remain in managing and minimizing plastic waste, Mattson adds.
The Loves offer two suggestions for how members can support FPA: invite lawmakers to tour their facilities and educate their own employees on the facts of flexible packaging.
“Social media is so heavily one-sided, and you want your associates and their families to have their story straight, so everybody can communicate it,” Jimmy Love says. “If you can’t articulate succinctly and effectively to your own people, and for them to communicate it to their families, you might not be able to do that very well out in the more skeptical open market. Make sure you’ve got your own people well-informed. FPA can help with that.”
FPA is stepping into the future by expanding the concentric circles around flexible packaging to include brand owners in sustainability conversations, David Love points out. The interests of brand owners and converters align, and “in a lot of ways, we’re the ones fighting their battles right now to keep their packaging from being banned,” he says.
FPA should also “think more creatively” about educating young people about plastic packaging and its benefits, while the industry itself takes a hard look at its context within the bigger picture of plastics and microplastics, he adds.
“We cannot have our heads in the sand about microplastics,” David Love says. “It doesn’t mean that our products are causing the problems, but it means that we need to stay close to it and try to get as much information as we can to understand whether there are certain circumstances where certain products we use may have a downstream effect of becoming microplastics.”
Still, customers have faith in flexible packaging, where the products are so workable that they rarely change to other packaging formats after they enter the market, David Love says. The industry is also adapting to incorporate nonplastic options, such as compostable and paper-based packaging, he adds.
“For all the reasons we believe our industry is doing the right thing—product protection, efficiency, low carbon footprint—it shows we are very sustainable,” David Love says. “Those are the things that we as an industry continue to have to lean in on.”
Flexible packaging often gets put on the defensive, in the recyclability “penalty box,” and classified as part of the problem. But with a common voice and a clear message, the industry has the power to reposition itself as part of the solution, Jimmy Love says.
“For so many reasons, flexible is a very efficient, low-cost way to package things, and we do not see that going away any time soon,” he says.
M. Diane McCormick is a writer based in York, Pennsylvania.