Rapidly evolving innovations from Taiwanese packaging companies are poised to redefine efficiency and sustainability on a global scale.

Instant noodles, burgers, asthma inhalers, and pain relief patches have more in common than one might think. They must be packaged well to safeguard the product’s quality, increase portability, improve operational efficiency, and avoid contamination.

Indeed, the packaging of consumer goods plays a crucial yet overlooked role in business performance. The global market for packaging was worth around US$300 billion in 2023. While rigid packaging, such as cans, jars, and containers, is predicted to hit around US$317 billion by 2031, flexible packaging – which includes the likes of bags, pouches, liners, wraps, and roll stock – is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.1% from 2023 to 2030, signaling a stable environment for investors looking for opportunities in the packaging sector.

Concurrently, the global market for packaging machinery is on an upward trajectory. PMMI Business Intelligence’s 2023 World Packaging Machinery report predicts a more robust 5% CAGR from 2023 to 2027, taking the market size from US$45.9 billion to US$56 billion.

Stakes are high for heavily export-oriented Taiwan, home to over 1,000 factories making packaging or packaging machines. Demand for these machines is driven by labor shortages both in Taiwan and its export markets.

During the Taipei Pack and Foodtech Taipei trade shows in late June, the Taiwan Packaging Association (TPA) reported strong growth in demand for connection lines that seamlessly link food processing machinery with packaging machines. These optimized lines provide factory owners with turnkey solutions that save labor costs and enhance food safety.

“The human eye easily makes mistakes, and a faultily packaged food product can easily land a food company in deep trouble,” says Benker P. C. Liao, the TPA chairman.

“Taiwan is strong in both the software and hardware needed for automation, and although we sometimes struggle to compete against Japan or China for standard packaging machinery solutions, we are more flexible and easier to communicate with, and our prices are reasonable,” he notes.

Liao predicts that in response to the drive for green transformation, the packaging sector will reduce the usage of packaging materials, facilitate improved recyclability, and double down on developing intelligent packaging equipment that harnesses artificial intelligence.

Breakthroughs in technology

At the Taipei Pack event, several of the 200 Taiwanese exhibitors of packaging machines reported that 2023 was an excellent year, as demand had fully recovered after Covid.

“During the pandemic, many factories closed down, and then after Covid many new factories opened, translating into strong demand for new machines, especially for powder filling for pharma and food,” says Jerry Chong, a sales representative at Yunlin-based Auger Enterprise. The company is an expert in precision weight checking, bagging, and filling for containers, bags, and sachets with powders, granules, liquids, and gels. Manufacturers of jam, jelly, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and traditional Chinese medicine depend on a high level of exactness in these processes.

Chong says that by making the filling machinery taller, it becomes easier to fill the powder so that it doesn’t stick to the top of the sachet, which would threaten the reliability of the sealing. As a welcome side effect of the added height, Auger fillers have become a suitable fit for factories in Singapore, the company’s key market, where floor space is limited. Auger says it stands out from the pack by offering its customers the services of its test laboratory to better understand which packaging materials and their respective fillings achieve optimally tailored packaging solutions.

“In terms of R&D, we are now focusing on shifting from measuring the fillings with the help of volume metrics to purely relying on high-accuracy weighing, as it greatly lowers the reject rates of the production process,” says Chong.

Taichung-based Hopak Machinery exhibited a similarly revolutionary new auto-filling system that can fill nougat into single soft pack sachets at a speed of 800 pieces per minute – a speed that had only previously been reached with hard candy – compared to the usual 300 pieces per minute.

“Before, we used a cylinder to fill the nougat, but replacing the cylinder with a rotary-based filling system allows us to reach a much higher speed,” explains Shawn Wei, an overseas sales manager at Hopak. The company applied a new coating to overcome the key headache of rotary-based filling heating up the machine’s surface, which made the nougat stick to the surface, he says. Thanks to the new coating, even if the nougat melts, it will no longer stick to the machine. Innovative machines for instant noodles, burgers, asthma inhalers, and pain relief patches have also seen significant advancements.

However, distinct differences in consumers’ packaging preferences challenge companies working to extend a product’s shelf life. Taiwanese consumers tend to favor carton packages, like those produced by Swedish inventor Tetra Pak, which mainly contain food and beverage products with a shelf life of 10 to 20 days. Many of Taiwan’s counterparts in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Mexico, and China are happy with tin cans that allow up to two years of shelf life.

“For fruit juices, energy drinks, tomato sauces, and their likes, metal cans are also better than PET bottles, given that they shield the filling from sunlight,” explains Ob Chen, general manager of Taichung-based Chang Shen Machinery, a manufacturer of equipment for can making, seaming, and beverage and soup filling.

More customers appreciate the usage of high-quality stainless steel and branded screws and bearings, says Chen. He attributes a strong sales performance in 2023 to their machines and strong aftersales services.

Printing the right thing

According to PMMI Business Intelligence’s 2023 World Packaging Machinery report, labeling, decorating, and coding machines are set to achieve one of the highest machinery segment growth rates during the forecast period, reaching US$7.2 billion in 2027 and representing a CAGR of 5.2% from 2023 to 2027.

Demand for such equipment has been driven by legislation on labeling requirements, traceability and tracking, and compliance standards, particularly in the food and beverage sector. The pharmaceutical industry is also pushing demand for these machines, aiming for greater visibility and traceability of packaged items from source to finish.

New Taipei City-based Sinletai Group is riding high on this trend, developing and manufacturing inkjet printers for coding and marking as its primary business. Sinletai’s inkjet journey began in 2005 with a technology license from California-based notebook and printer giant HP. This year Sinletai launched a print controller that can simultaneously support four different production lines, keeping acquisition costs down while making it easier to control the production process. At Taipei Pack, Sinletai also presented a novel handheld printer that prints date labels and company logos on a cardboard box with impressive convenience and accuracy.

“We have been focused on Japan, Korea, Thailand, and China and recently found a major German partner, but our strongest new focus market is India, as there is a rapidly growing pharma industry in that country,” says Eric Chou, a sales representative at Sinletai. The company has sold 100 inkjet printers in just three months in India, all of which were for pharma factories, he notes.

Meanwhile, the Taiwanese government has encouraged the island’s export-oriented manufacturers to shift from carbon-intensive packaging to low-carbon solutions. In 2023, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) assigned a New Taipei-based design firm, Thirteen Studio, to change the packaging of Taiwanese auto suspension manufacturer RacingBros from plastic foam-based to cardboard-only.

The designers’ first step was to replace the ink on the original outer cardboard packaging with stickers to lower water pollution caused by excessive ink use. Representing yet another environmental advantage, the stickers can easily be removed by the consumer with a hair dryer to reuse the packaging. Thirteen Studio went on to eliminate the foam inlays with cardboard partitions, significantly reducing fossil fuel consumption. The solution makes do without any glue, taking its inspiration from traditional carpentry that was done entirely without nails, bolts, and screws.

Thirteen Studio estimates that one trained person needs less than three minutes to complete the assembly of one box, given that the cardboard arrives ready-cut by the supplier. The designers note that in numerous drop tests, the protection provided by the cardboard boxes was just as good as with foam-based packaging.

“Of course, the production cost of our cardboard boxes is higher than for foam-based packaging, but the cardboard saves a lot of storage cost, given that foam plates are much thicker,” explains Thirteen Studio’s Chief Designer, who goes by the single name of Han.

“The main challenge is topology – when creating a three-dimensional package from a piece of cardboard, the limitation is the size of the cardboard,” he says. “We can only use regular-sized cardboard.”

Han points out that convincing Taiwanese manufacturers to shift to low-carbon packaging solutions is still a challenge. “They must think hard about breaking even, so only the visionary among the entrepreneurs will risk shifting,” Han says.

It is probably worth the risk. Market researcher GlobalData recently found that amid growing awareness of the environmental impact of packaging waste, the key trends in packaging regulation all center on making packaging materials and types more sustainable.

“Sustainability impacts the purchase decisions of consumers globally,” says Kakarlapudi Karthik Varma, project manager of the Consumer Reports team at GlobalData. He notes that “50% of respondents in our [recent] survey said they are always or often influenced by whether the product packaging is sustainably manufactured.”

“Brands will therefore have to invest in sustainable pack materials to comply with both regulatory requirements and evolving consumer preferences,” he concludes.