How can glass help your product to stand out on the shelf?
With issues like health, quality and sustainability being on the top of consumer’s minds, how can choosing glass help your product stand out on busy shelves? In our third LinkedIn Live Q&A session, we brought together the worlds of academia and sales to discuss what glass packaging can say about your brand.
The live event was moderated by Adeline Farrelly, FEVE’s Secretary General who sat down with Guido Cristini, Professor of Marketing in the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Parma and Emanuele Caricati, Director of Vendite Italia and Sales Officer at Levico Acque.
Missed the live session? Read our breakdown of the four key take-aways from the event.
Packaging matters – and consumers like glass
We cannot and must not underestimate the role of packaging. Whether it’s niche, premium products or fast moving consumer goods, packaging is a key part of getting your product to perform the best it can. To help your product to stand out on the shelf, Professor Guido Cristini highlights the crucial attributes that we consumers look for in our packaging: protection, product conservation, comfort, quality and design.
Out of all packaging materials tested on these attributes, Professor Cristini’s shows that glass comes number one. Glass is acknowledged as the highest quality packaging material, excellent for product conservation, safety and – being totally transparent – display on busy shop shelves. Given glass’ popularity, there is a significant market space for glass containers in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) world.
Glass helps brands tell their story
Emanuele Caricati tells us that glass is the perfect packaging choice for products that are also pure and natural and want to convey these characteristics. For a premium Italian water brand like Levico, preserving the quality and purity of their product is the highest packaging priority. As a natural, inert material, glass is the most suitable packaging choice to prevent external contamination into the product, preserve its quality, and even extend its shelf life, resulting in less waste. By choosing glass, brands like Levico can highlight the purity of their product and their concern for sustainability.
Glass is the king of sustainability
Nowadays, we’re all paying more attention to environmental issues. According to the two speakers, sustainability now represents a clear driver for product choice and purchase. The entire value chain is looking for packaging that is respectful to the environment, attentive to social dimensions and economically sustainable. When it comes to these criteria, Professor Cristini’s research again finds that glass is preferred packaging material.
Glass is the obvious choice for meeting the requirements expressed by the circular economy model, where we reuse materials, reduce waste and recycle. As Emanuele points out, unlike other materials, glass is reusable up to 30 times, 100% endlessly recyclable and always food safe, making it, in fact, a “permanent material”. Brands choosing glass show that they take sustainability seriously, just like their customers do.
“The glass bottle, which is created to maximise its shelf life, is crucial for us. It definitely makes a huge contribution to reducing our carbon footprint.” – Emanuele Caricati
The glass value chain needs to come together
Achieving a circular economy is a tough challenge, but one we’re up for. To make real progress on circularity, Professor Cristini calls for a strategic and operational alignment of each actor in the value chain – including well-informed consumer-citizens – to achieve higher recycling and reuse rates in Europe. Luckily, the container glass industry is one step ahead of him with the Close the Glass Loop initiative. Close the Glass Loop is an industry-led recycling action platform that brings together the entire glass packaging ecosystem. Its goal? Boosting Europe’s recycling collection rates to 90% by 2030.
With the European container glass industry leading efforts to achieve a sustainable, circular economy, the image glass enjoys as the environmentally friendly packaging choice will only get stronger. Brands can make the most of this image to help their product stand out on the shelf. Glass packaging tells consumers that your brand cares about the long-term quality of your product, the health of the consumer, and the health of the planet. In short, it’s the future, made clear.
Did you learn something about what glass packaging can do for your product? Have any stories of brands that have made the switch to glass? Head over to LinkedIn and let us know! To keep up to date with the latest trends in the glass industry or our upcoming Q&As, don’t forget to follow our new LinkedIn account: @glasshallmark.
