Perrigo Oral Care’s Strategic Approach to Sustainable Packaging

Perrigo is committed to making the world a healthier place not only with their product offerings, but also through recognizing their impact on the environment and striving to be a good corporate citizen. The company’s Oral Care business saw an opportunity to look at product packaging from this lens. However, the business did not yet understand its starting point and improvement opportunities. An added challenge stemmed from there being different business drivers for its product portfolio, some of which are private brand and the rest that is their own/national branded items.

Our team helped Perrigo Oral Care develop its strategic approach from the ground up. This included reviewing the market landscape, determining the baseline/starting point, identifying improvement opportunities, and developing packaging design guidance and roadmaps for progress.

The first step was to get a comprehensive list of Perrigo Oral Care’s retail customer goals and requirements for sustainable packaging. This helped identify deadlines and specifications that would be baseline expectations. A look at other market drivers, such as emerging regulations, non-profit projects, and other programs helped with understanding the broader trends with sustainable packaging.

The insights from the market landscape helped identify potential priorities for the business, but a closer look at the packaging materials was needed to have a plan and to begin to make changes. So, the Perrigo Oral Care team collected all the details on the product packaging materials used. This required looking at specifications and asking suppliers for more information. Compiling this information is often a significant undertaking. Our team helped Perrigo Oral Care define what information was needed, review the data to find places where more information was needed, and then helped to assess the collected information. The sustainable packaging baseline that came from this effort was critical to understanding where the business was starting — to then identify where to go next – in relation to customers aims, market trends, and the business’s own sustainability goals and ambitions.

While Perrigo, at the corporate level, has sustainable packaging goals, the Oral Care business wanted a clear plan to not just meet those, but also find ways to push for more progress. Two resources were developed, 1) a sustainable packaging guide and 2) sustainable packaging roadmaps.

The guide defines what the business means by more sustainable packaging and what design choices meet those definitions. The guide also includes minimum expectations and areas to continue to improve in. These were different for the various types of products (e.g., more sustainable products had higher minimum expectations). The topics covered included multiple sustainable packaging levers such as recycled content, sustainable sourcing of fiber, reducing material mass, removing PVC, and others.

The sustainable packaging roadmaps were developed to help the sales teams and product/packaging development teams understand the changes needed for packaging and what that involved. This included identifying specific products and the design changes to make, with an estimate of feasibility and cost impacts. This work helped the team to begin to progress their work with more sustainable packaging.

Michael Wright, Perrigo Oral Care R&D Director New Product Development, points out that, “Pure Strategies has been an invaluable partner to Perrigo Oral Care in the creation and implementation of our Packaging Sustainability Program. Their subject matter expertise and ability to distill the various complexities of our products, customers, and markets into actionable plans has greatly accelerated the maturity of our program and its contribution to our business.”