While the baking and snack industries have made great strides integrating sustainability practices into their businesses, there are certainly gaps that need to be resolved. Sometimes, however, those gaps are waiting to be filled by technology that hasn’t been perfected yet. 

“We do have initiatives with targets of 2030 on the brand producer side, but a lot of those goals are hard to achieve, sometimes cost-prohibitive for a lot of companies,” explained Rebecca Marquez, director of custom research for PMMI Media Group. “We have to keep in mind that at the end of the day companies are looking for profitability.”

The packaging side in particular has some ground to cover when it comes to consumer education and packaging materials. The United States’ recycling infrastructure is a patchwork system that differs from municipality to municipality and even more so from state to state. Compostable materials aren’t as simple to dispose of as putting them directly into the ground to decompose. There are a few chemical steps that must occur first that the United States doesn’t quite have the infrastructure to support. 

PMMI partnered with Ameripen in 2022 on the Packaging Compass, a report detailing drivers of packaging changes among US consumer packaged goods companies and what types of packaging materials they were using. Further research from PMMI has equated to thousands of data points. The information is tracked online through a dashboard that is free and available to everyone. The results over time have shocked Marquez. 

“We knew that plastics would be something brand producers would be moving away from,” she said. “The biggest findings in the report, though, were No. 1, everyone is waiting for compostables to really come through; No. 2, everyone is talking about getting away from plastics, but their usage is going up, and No. 3, flexible pouches are going gangbusters. So on the one hand, attitudes are shifting away from plastics, but then the industry is also wanting to put everything in a plastic pouch.” 

In addition, Marquez teased a future report from PMMI that looks at the gap between brand producers and the equipment suppliers of packaging equipment. Transitioning between packaging materials can be challenging because packaging equipment is so specifically calibrated to the film it is set to run. 

“Our members understand that there are issues with material transitions on machines,” Marquez said. “But we want to make sure our members have an excellent grasp of the changes our industry is going through and of what their customers, the end users, are wanting and needing for their operations to be successful moving forward.” 

The report, a follow-up to PMMI’s sustainability report will be available in early May.

This article is an excerpt from the April 2025 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Sustainability, click here.