There are a lot of pink packages on the shelves these October days. The number of pink containers we’re seeing in club stores, office supply stores, drug and grocery stores, etc. attests to the popularity and broad appeal of cause-related packaging.

And now, researchers at Cone, Inc. and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business have research showing that cause related marketing is a sales booster, too. From Procter & Gamble, a company that knows a thing or two about marketing, we’ve noticed pink canisters of Folgers Coffee, bottles of Dawn dishwashing liquids and composite cans of Pringles potato crisps - in whole or in part pinked up to observe National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Double digit sales increases are not uncommon when a product sends a cause-related message to consumers, according to the 2008 Cone Cause Evolutions Study. Most (85%) of consumers say they have a more positive image of companies that support causes they care about. There’s no indication in the study that consumers are buying pink packages of products they wouldn’t otherwise buy, but there is a strong suggestion that pinking up is a strong force in getting consumers to switch brands. Cause-related marketing is associated with product sales increases of 14%-28% - a boost that would be almost impossible to replicate with any other marketing strategy. Obviously, doing good is good for business.

Packaging protects. Usually, that protection is either physical OR environmental.

Making their way around the country these days are packages that afford their contents - temperature-sensitive prescription drugs - protection of both types. Remarkably, the packages are (A) flexible (B) reusable (C) recyclable and (D) economical when compared to other options that might be used. While the pharma field is the first to see the benefits of this pack, national chocolateers may see in Entropy Solutions a packaging answer to the age old challenge of moving chocolate to consumers in the melting heat of summer.

Ergonomic, user friendly packaging is the focus of many patents. One of those patents - US 7,040,500 B2 - issued in 2006, made news in the last few days because, its holder contends, three ideas covered in the patent - a lid that holds a special scoop in place, a channel around the base of the container that allows users to scoop out the granular contents of the container and a stacking feature - are infringed by another manufacturer. The holder of the patent, Bristol-Myers Squibb, is taking Abbott Nutrition to court, contending that its new infant formula canister violates the patents BMS developed for its infant formula. In the quest for innovation a growing number of companies are seeking to protect package designs with patents. What Abbott’s stance on this matter is, remains to be seen. We’ll watch and report.

Hurricane Ike, a category two when it made landfall, wreaked havoc in Texas and across a swath of the Mid-West. In its wake, millions of homes and more than a few industrial manufacturing plants were darkened for days. For packaging resin customers, the impact of the storm has left a lasting impact on operations.

You’ve got to hand it to the folks at Hewlett-Packard – figuring out a way to remove 97% of the packaging required for one of its laptops.

How’d they do it?

By packing the laptop and all the gear that goes with it into a trendy messenger bag made of recycled materials. It’s such a neat idea that people may buy the computer just to get their hands on the bag…

Well, maybe not.

But if they did it would be the first time that anyone consciously considered the package that a laptop comes in.

Take a bow, HP. You’ve cut out a new path for others to follow.

If you’re not intimately involved in the candy, paperboard carton or flexible packaging businesses, you might think there’s little new or inventive coming out of those sectors.

You’d be wrong.

M&M’s® Premiums – a confection with a family name that has long heritage and a popular following, but not known for particularly inventive packaging – is targeting “savvy social” twentysomething women with a packaging and product offering that’s already stopping consumers of all ages and genders and triggering impulse buying of the candy in its first weeks in the marketplace.

A pressure sensitive, peel-to-open and press-to-close pouch holds the goodies and lets you know this was packaged for the ladies. If this were a manly man candy – or something for kids – the pouch certainly wouldn’t have a reclosing feature…or be packed into a curvy carton reminiscent of those you’d find in the cosmetics section of the local drug or department store.

Whether the candy’s a hit with the ladies it’s made for or not, the package sure sets it apart from most of the other ones in the candy counter. Will Mars team up with theaters to offer this goody for chicks’ movies? Let’s watch and see. I know a few guys who’re going to be popping M&M’s Premiums in the stands.

And we don’t care who sees us.

Sustainability is a good thing - from both a business and an environmental standpoint. At the core of every successful business enterprise, the ability to continue - to sustain the operation - is critical to its survival. That point - couched in a variety of operational and environmental terms - will be made repeatedly during the Conference at PACK EXPO, the educational program that accompanies PACK EXPO International, November 9-13 in Chicago’s McCormick Place. More than a third of the sessions of the Conference at PACK EXPO, and all four of the program’s keynoters, will address sustainability from one standpoint or another. Go to PEI2008.Packexpo.com to see the full conference offering and put together your personal program at the “early bird” discount price of $55 per session.

Listen closely to what the conference speakers are saying - and what many exhibitors are saying, too - and you’ll recognize that many of the traditional justifications for manufacturing a package or operating a packaging systems in a particular way - maximizing uptime, maintaining quality and efficiency, operating cost effectively, running a lean manufacturing and administrative facility - are manufacturing’s way of addressing the conservation of precious limited resources of time, labor, energy, materials and finances.

At the end of the day, sustainability is about survival. And there’s not a packaging enterprise out there that isn’t trying to extend its ability to continue. Always been that way.

Operating that way is good, smart business. And…it’s sustainable.

ConAgra’s making a gutsy move switching to recycled content trays for its frozen foods.

Most past research has shown that most consumers prefer RECYCLABLE food containers and are less enthusiastic, even concerned about RECYCLED food containers. So, don’t expect the change to be the hallmark of some new marketing campaign from Omaha. Like the big soft drink packagers who’ve added PCR content PET to their packages before them, don’t expect ConAgra to trumpet its achievement to consumers.

Consumers will find out soon enough. Pro- and anti- business bloggers, advocates for and against using recycled materials to package food, and proponents and opponents of just about anything any consumer goods company does these days will say something about ConAgra’s move - and consumers headed for the frozen food aisle will have something to think about.

No matter what else might happen in the frozen food marketplace over the next 52 weeks, if sales of any of the PCR-packed items begin to falter, it’s going to be blamed by someone on the switch. Of course, if sales go up, the packaging, purchasing, marketing folks at ConAgra deserve to take a bow for what looks from here to be a pretty gutsy move.

The idea of molding pulp into a bottle has been tried before. The idea won a Japanese company a WorldStar award from the World Packaging Organisation about nine years ago. The Japanese were coating the bottle interior and using it to pack a laundry detergent. Now, in the UK, an inventor’s come up with a molded fiber clamshell that, in effect, becomes a rigid sheath for a film bag that holds milk...all in the name of materials reduction and going green. ASDA, a Wal-Mart operation in England, likes the idea and its testing it in several of its UK outlets. The milk pouch-in-molded pulp carton is being promoted for its small environmental footprint and recyclability. Whether the Brits will take to milk that comes in recycled (albeit not in direct contact with the milk) containers is something we’ll have to wait to see. In the US, some consumers raised a furor when Wal-Mart introduced an HDPE cube for milk because they thought it hard to handle, never mind that it uses a lot less material on the trip from the dairy to the cooler.

Where’d it come from? Where’d it go?

The lack of transparency in the global supply chain is worrisome. The consumer can return spoiled food or a leaking package to the store where it was purchased. The retailer will generally take the item back - if the consumer has a receipt. But the way the system is set up, the retailer has little incentive to check if the item got spoiled or damaged before or after it came into the store’s hands. Usually the questionable product gets classified as "unsaleable" and charged back to the manufacturer. That does nothing to determine how, when and by whom the product came to become unsaleable.

If a manufacturer initiates a voluntary recall, the alarm almost never makes it to the public before most of the questionable product is consumed. And, despite all the efforts of the CDC and FDA, we are coming to learn that if contaminated produce kills or sickens someone, we do not yet have certain ways of determining where the produce was grown or how it came to be tainted.

Prescription drugs change hands many times on the way from the manufacturer to the patient, making it relatively easy for counterfeits to be dispensed to patients. And 25 years after Tylenol capsules were laced with cyanide, we still don’t know who did it - or what path the capsules took on their way from Camp Hill, PA to Cook County, IL.

It’s about time everyone had answers to those two questions.