Canning means competition for the pouch industry

MIAMI — It's been more than 30 years since Robert Weick worked on his first pouch project for a fruit canner that ended up being years ahead of its time.

That packaging ultimately failed, he said, because the market just wasn't ready.

“We were going to go out and we were going to change the world with that pouch. What we ended up with was a learning event,” he said. “We took it out to the market and we really had expectations on how it was going to be received.

“And it hit a brick wall,” he remembered.

But that was then, and this is now.

Weick, now vice president of packaging systems optimization for ConAgra Foods Inc., knows as well as anybody about the growing popularity of pouches these days.

“The change in this industry has been terrific and it has been tremendous over the years,” he said at the recent Global Pouch Forum in Miami. “It has grown in a lot of different ways. I see a lot of opportunity, a lot of runway out there for future growth in the pouch industry.

“But there are challenges that go with that, and some serious challenges. How do we unlock that runway? How do we get to aligning things to be able to move forward?” Weick said.

One challenge is that existing canning infrastructure isn't just going to go away anytime soon, he said. ConAgra, a $16 billion company, uses pouches but also is one of the top can users in the North America.

“The fact is the steel can has some fierce competition. But it also has some competitive capabilities. Part of that is driven by our industry and the systems that we have,” he said.

“They are called canneries for a reason. They are designed to run cans. And the capitalization, the asset base, how do you overcome that in the business is a continuing challenge as we go forward,” he said.

Cans also are stiff competition when it comes to “a costs of goods impact,” he said, as they can be easily stacked and stored and have a long shelf life.

“I would say we have several pouches out in the market. Most of these are done internationally. And the reason for that is heavily driven by we're putting in different asset capabilities to support pouches in those markets,” Weick said.

Innovation away from cans to pouches not only has to overcome existing domestic canning infrastructure, but also address issues such as line speed, open-reclose features, and “real or imagined size limitations,” he said.

“Cans run at higher line speeds. Does that always add up to do we have to run at higher line speeds,” he asked. “Not necessarily.

“But what are the opportunities for pouches? Because there are. There's a long runway here. There's a lot of opportunity of what we can do with pouches. They are improving on the consumer and customer front in terms of perception,” Weick said.

“And they are great graphic billboards. There's flexibility in a pouch in terms of some of the appearance and the aesthetics. It's doesn't always have to be a rectangle. You can actually do some things that help integrate design and graphics and impact at the shelf,” he said.