Ben Schwartz’s Perspective

PERSPECTIVE

Ben Schwartz

supply chain senior manager

Our 2030 vision for packaging at Acme is to provide sustainable packaging to our customers and consumers without compromising food safety, product quality, and sales. As the head of Acme’s supply chain, part of my job is to be on the lookout for efficiencies that are good for both the company and the planet.

Our short-term goals include conducting a baseline assessment of our packaging to gain a holistic understanding of the impact of our current packaging situation. Once we know where we stand, this will help our efforts to reduce overall packaging and/or increase the amount of recyclable content in our packaging. In particular, we are looking into corrugated box standardization and optimization, plastic film gauge and thickness reduction, and polyethylene single stream plastic film. Educating ourselves and consumers about packaging sustainability and recyclability will be important as well. We are now closely following sustainable (compostable, biodegradable, bio-based, etc.) packaging technology developments, assessing technical and financial feasibility of new technology, and we intend to eventually help consumers understand ways to recycle Acme packages.

We’ll be presenting a summary of findings and impacts in the 2022 Sustainability Report, but for now, I’m excited to be working with my team on this exciting journey.