Five years ago this week, the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic and the U.S. declared a public health emergency. The packaging industry, like others, experienced a wide range of changes.
“COVID-19 accelerated a lot of trends that were already in progress at the time,” said Jennifer Christ, manager of consumer and commercial goods research at The Freedonia Group.
In 2020 and the years that followed, the pandemic changed much of life — and business operations — as people knew it. Customer inventory fluctuations impacted packaging sales for many quarters. Today, some of the impacts of operational changes and consumer trends still have a mark in manufacturing and packaging formats themselves.
Pandemic lockdowns also changed where people spent disposable income. Consumers transitioned to buying more packaged goods versus spending as much on experiences, leading to a demand boom for some manufacturers.
“You couldn't go to the movie theaters, you couldn't go to see Taylor Swift,” said Ryan Fox, corrugated packaging market analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “And so what did we see people do? They bought new furniture,” new appliances, new bicycles — you name it.
Consumption and demand patterns evolve
E-commerce is at the forefront of sticky trends that the pandemic accelerated.
There was especially a spike in box demand, Fox explained. At their peak in early 2022, some lead times increased to 10 or more weeks (by comparison, average lead times in early 2025 were approximately eight days, according to Fox.) It was hard for businesses to keep up with the huge demand, in part because people who had been in the corrugated box production for decades were “worked to the bone” and some left the industry, he said.
Consumers used more packaging as they moved away from in-person retail toward online shopping, Christ said. That led to the development of more “e-commerce-ready packaging that is designed for shipping instead of the retail shelf.”
The rise of e-commerce has also prompted form-factor changes. In one example, the industry underwent “a shift from boxes to mailers as shipments were more frequent and included fewer items,” she said, along with “more development of flexible packaging to enable lighter weight and more compact shipments.”
As for meals, there was also a “huge move to food delivery,” which required more packaging, Christ said. While both food delivery and carryout were well-established options for pizza and quick-service restaurants, the rise of third-party, app-based ordering and COVID-era consumer habit changes accelerated that movement in other food service segments, she said. That trend persists.
“While diners did return to in-house dining, the convenience of carryout and delivery has kept that activity elevated from pre-COVID times, establishing a new and much higher norm to grow from,” Christ said.
This has contributed to innovations with packaging design, she said, including with tamper-evident packaging to help food to retain its quality and prevent contamination or spills during transport.
In addition, the food delivery trend supports the enhanced push for sustainable packaging, Christ said.
“The increasing use of single-use delivery packaging made the amount of waste generated more obvious to consumers, and thus increased the call for more sustainable options,” she said. “Of course, this move has been muted by inflationary pressures,” she said, as it makes consumers less amenable to paying premiums for sustainable packaging.
Technology and supply chain shifts
A decline in experienced workers around the time of the pandemic necessitated more investment in new equipment and automation, Fox noted. “That has probably been the number one mark on the industry: how do you deal with the people that actually make this thing happen?”
While remote access, robotics and other digital technologies weren’t new at the time, pandemic-era limitations forced many companies to more seriously consider them, said Jorge Izquierdo, vice president of market development at PMMI, the Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies.
“During all those years of growth, we saw investment [in] all types of equipment, primary packaging, secondary packaging, end of the line,” the latter being related with workforce challenges, he said. “COVID was really a catalyzer for the adoption of remote technologies.” 2020, 2021 and into 2022 were big years for investment.
Without the pandemic shakeup, it likely would have “taken maybe twice as many years to get where we are today in terms of new technologies and investment by manufacturers of consumer products,” he said.
Pandemic disruptions also had implications for how companies managed their supply chains. In some cases, where companies had trouble sourcing their typical materials, it revealed how existing equipment wasn’t necessarily adaptable to new materials, said Izquierdo. Additionally, many companies started looking at how to shorten and diversify supply chains.
From the product manufacturer side of things, there were takeaways for future periods of disruption, explained Brian Stepowany, packaging R&D senior manager at B&G Foods, whose brands include Green Giant, Cream of Wheat and Crisco. Should there be another crisis, it would be easier to manage robots than a large workforce of people, he said.
The challenging time actually strengthened and prompted greater appreciation for relationships with suppliers, said Stepowany, a board member with the Institute of Packaging Professionals. “I think because of the crisis and the requirements to get our products out to the consumers, it caused us to work a lot closer together.”
As for thinking about supply chain resilience and diversification, Stepowany said his company “definitely addressed having a potential wider base, but the packaging industry and supplier base is changing. There's a lot of suppliers going away,” he said, citing recent combination announcements between Smurfit Kappa and WestRock as well as Amcor and Berry.
It gets to be a challenging scenario “to make sure you're not putting all your eggs in one basket per se, that you would have a secondary source in case company A has a strike or company B has a [plant catastrophe],” he said. “So we have to have a secondary source at least qualified and ready to go.”
Xinnan Li, packaging and logistics analyst at RaboResearch, expanded on this.
“As the industry gets more consolidated, it is harder for customers to diversify because wherever they go is kind of the same large players,” Li said. “And actually very similarly for the small-medium sized packaging producers as well; as the industry gets more consolidated, but also more vertically integrated ... it is harder [to source fiber] on the most open market, the size of the pie is just getting smaller.”
For companies that survived and came out well after the volatility of the pandemic, a future disruption may be a little less intimidating. But still, the consolidated nature of industry doesn’t necessarily help.
Given uncertainty in the economy right now with changing trade policies and more, “the next couple of years maybe also requires a lot of diversification or reshuffling of their supply chain,” she said. “This whole supply chain issue is ongoing.”
