Smart Packaging Comes to Market

This article concerns the market for electronic smart packaging devices, increasingly known as "e packaging". Global demand for these devices will grow rapidly from a mere $76 million in 2013 to $1.45 billion in 2023. Most of this will involve consumer packaged goods CPG. The rapid growth will be driven by trials now being carried out by leading CPG companies and the rapid technical developments emanating from over 3000 organisations, half of them academic, that are currently working on printed and potentially printed electronics. There will also be growth from existing applications such as talking pizza boxes, winking logos on multipacks of biscuits and bottles of rum, compliance monitoring blisterpacks in drug trials, prompting plastic bottles of drugs that prompt the user, testers on batteries and reprogrammable decoration on mobile phones. However, our projected adoption, large as it may seem, only represents a few percent of CPG packages being fitted with these devices in 2023.