The 8th European ‘Stand-up Pouch Conference’ on 6 and 7 November 2024 in Vienna provided an impressive demonstration of how sustainable, practical, and cost-effective stand-up pouches are as a packaging format. With excellent barrier properties, reduced packaging materials, and smart design, they succeed in creating new, consumer-friendly packaging solutions.
The growth of stand-up pouches remains strong. The speakers in the specialist presentations demonstrated impressively why this is the case and how the market is continuing to develop from different perspectives. As part of the Innoform event series, Karsten Schröder organised and moderated the conference, which, now in its eighth year, brought together experts from industry, research, and brand owner companies.
Supercharge Your Packaging
In his presentation “Supercharge Your Packaging” Dani Tulchinski from Sealed Air Corporation introduced their BUILDR platform. BUILDR helps brands to successfully launch their pack products to market and minimise the risk in their packaging investment, with data-driven innovation and sustainable, flexible packaging pouch and roll stock solutions. With a customer-focused and service-driven approach, BUILDR services support clients through material selection, format and size optimization, design, messaging, and product pricing elasticity. Furthermore, brand owners can select rapid prototyping (digital and/or physical), thus gathering customer feedback digitally within hours on their packaging tailored to industry-specific needs.
Sustainability as a Business Enabler
In his presentation, “Sustainability as a Business Enabler,” Josep Isart from HP Indigo outlined the reasons why digital printing offers advantages in the rapidly growing market for stand-up pouches. Building on the well-known benefits of digital printing, such as short-run production with quick turnaround times, a major trend driving the shift from rigid to flexible packaging is sustainability through refillability. Brands benefit from switching to flexible packaging like pouches with lower production costs, improved logistics, often larger decoration areas, greater shelf visibility, and overall enhanced sustainability. Digital printing also enables completely new business models, as the next lecture of the Labelisten shows.
Small Amounts – Huge Variety
Nina Beck from Labelisten presented, “Small Amounts – Huge Variety,” in which she explained why large clients increasingly require smaller order quantities. As the lifecycle, batch size, and lead time of products continue to shorten, the demand for personalisation, limited editions, and design variety is rising – trends that are making production processes more complex. Labelisten addresses this challenge through material standardisation and the use of digital printing, both of which enable a high level of design variety for stand-up pouches. Combined with a simplified, digitalised ordering process, this approach enables just-in-time deliveries, sometimes within just a few hours.
Ultrasonic Sealing
Presenting “High-Performance Mono-material Pouches with Ultrasonic Sealing,” Stefano Di Maiolo from Wipf AG explained the advantages of ultrasonic sealing technology, which significantly expands the applications for recyclable mono-PP and mono-PE pouches. Since the method applies energy precisely and selectively as heat, it enables reliable, damage-free sealing of heat-sensitive mono-materials. This results in a wide range of packaging solutions, from sterilisable and pasteurisable mono-PP pouches with high oxygen barriers to mono-PE and mono-PP stand-up pouches with functional features like spouts. He also spoke of an investment in a triplex laminating system using solvent-free adhesives, the first of its kind. This system leads to a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions at Wipf AG and supports its customers in achieving climate targets in Scope 3.
PE & PP monofilms
In her presentation, “Stand-up Pouches – Sustainability Well Positioned with PE & PP Monofilms,” Susanne Zobel-Reusch from Polifilm Extrusion GmbH introduced innovative mono-material solutions. For the printable outer layer, MDO-PE films offer a full replacement for PET, with an optional EVOH oxygen barrier, available as an ultra-thin 18 µm film. Additionally, there are PP-based, printable, and early sealing films that are sterilisable and exhibit low shrinkage. As an all-in-one solution for stand-up pouches, Polifilm offers a PP mono-material film with an EVOH barrier and a low sealing temperature, eliminating the need for lamination. This solution has already proven effective for coffee packaging and can be flexibly adapted to meet specific requirements.
Summary
Karsten Schröder concluded the conference with a concise summary of the presentations. Recyclable mono-materials form the basis for more sustainable solutions in stand-up pouches, with technological advancements in barrier properties expanding their range of applications. Printing techniques such as digital printing on pre-made pouches enable print runs from as few as 1 piece. Increasingly, premium products use stand-up pouches to present food, pet food, beverages, and cosmetics in a visually appealing and practical way. The growth of online retail further boosts the popularity of this lightweight, durable packaging format. With minimal space requirements and low transport volumes, stand-up pouches are ideal for shipping and offer consumers high functionality and ease of use. Preparations are already underway for the 9th European Stand-Up Pouch Conference in two years.