How a Global FMCG Brand Eliminated Shrink Film From Bottled Water Packaging - Without New Capital Investment
Sustainable secondary packaging is collation and grouping packaging - the layer that holds multiple primary units together for transit and shelf, such as shrink film around bottled water - redesigned to cut plastic use or eliminate film entirely, without sacrificing transit performance or requiring new capital equipment. For categories still defaulting to shrink film because it's familiar and cheap upfront, it's increasingly the difference between meeting a sustainability target and missing one.
A global FMCG company had a straightforward-sounding brief: launch a new 1.5L bottled water SKU without relying on shrink film for collation. The complication was everything attached to that one condition. The replacement had to match shrink film's transit performance, hold to existing cost limits, meet sustainability targets the brand had already committed to publicly, and do all of that without triggering new capital investment in equipment or tooling.
That last constraint is usually where these projects stall. Most shrink-film alternatives on the market assume a brand is willing to retool a line or install new machinery to get there. This one couldn't.
Why Shrink Film Is a Default, Not a Decision
Shrink film persists in secondary packaging for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it's the right choice: it's a known quantity, existing lines are built around it, and switching costs - real or assumed - tend to kill the conversation before it starts. The result is that a lot of collation packaging is running on inertia rather than an active decision to use plastic film over the alternatives.
That inertia is getting more expensive. Plastic packaging levies, extended producer responsibility fees, and public sustainability commitments are all moving in the same direction - toward penalising exactly the kind of single-use film that shrink-wrap collation depends on. A brand that waits for a mandate before addressing this ends up making the change under worse conditions: less time, less budget flexibility, and a regulator instead of an R&D team setting the terms.
A Three-Tier Framework for Evaluating the Alternatives
Rather than treating "remove the shrink film" as a single design problem, the approach here broke it into three distinct levels of intervention - because the right answer for one product format isn't automatically the right answer for another, and testing all three in parallel is what actually produces a defensible recommendation instead of a guess.
| Intervention level | What changes | When it's the right level |
|---|---|---|
| Primary packaging | The bottle itself - structural changes to the individual unit that reduce or remove the need for external collation support. | When the product format has room to absorb structural change without affecting brand or shelf presence. |
| Secondary packaging | The collation layer only - replacing shrink film with an alternative grouping mechanism while leaving the primary bottle untouched. | When the primary format is fixed (branding, mould investment already sunk) and the constraint has to be solved downstream. |
| Integrated primary + secondary systems | Both layers designed together, so the bottle and its collation method are engineered as one system rather than two separate specs. | When there's genuine flexibility on both fronts and the biggest material or cost gains come from the interface between them. |
More than 15 format combinations were evaluated across these three tiers before a recommendation was made. That volume of testing matters here specifically because the brief ruled out capital investment - without it, there's no safety net of "we'll just retool if this doesn't work." The recommended format had to be right on the first commercial run.
The constraint that mattered most: Every one of the 15+ formats tested had to work within the client's existing equipment and line setup. That's a materially harder brief than "find a sustainable alternative" - it's "find a sustainable alternative that this specific factory can run tomorrow."
What This Process Actually Delivered
The engagement's value showed up in three distinct ways, and they're worth separating because they answer different questions a packaging or R&D lead would actually ask before greenlighting a similar project.
It validated in-house R&D work, rather than replacing it
The client's own R&D team had already been working on the shrink-film problem internally. Bringing in an external evaluation didn't start from zero - it was stress-tested and confirmed the direction the internal team had already been leaning toward, which is a meaningfully different (and faster) outcome than starting a redesign from scratch.
It made the shortlist smaller, not just longer
Evaluating 15+ viable formats sounds like it produces more options, not fewer decisions. In practice, the value was in narrowing that field down to a single best-fit recommendation based on performance feasibility and sustainability impact together - not sustainability in isolation, which is where a lot of shrink-film alternatives quietly fail once transit testing gets involved.
It held to a tight timeline
Insights were delivered within the program's existing schedule, with no operational delay introduced by bringing in outside evaluation. For a brand under pressure to hit a launch date, that's not a minor detail - a sustainability improvement that pushes back a launch by a quarter is a much harder sell internally than one that fits inside the timeline that was already committed to.
What This Means for Brands Facing the Same Shrink-Film Question
The pattern here generalises past bottled water. Any category still defaulting to shrink film - beverages, personal care multipacks, food service collation - is sitting on the same three-tier decision, whether or not anyone's framed it that way yet: fix it at the primary level, fix it at the secondary level, or redesign both together.
The starting point that actually moves a project forward is narrower than it sounds: take one SKU already scheduled for a packaging review, and run the three-tier framework against it before defaulting to "more sustainable film" as the only option on the table. That's usually a smaller, cheaper piece of work than it sounds, and it's the same design-to-value discipline - matching material and format decisions to what the product and supply chain actually need, rather than what's already on the line - that shapes this kind of engagement from the start.
It also connects directly to the material and format optimisation work already covered in this series: the same right-sizing logic that applies to a bottle's primary structure applies just as directly to the collation layer wrapped around it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is sustainable secondary packaging?
Sustainable secondary packaging redesigns the collation layer - the packaging that groups multiple primary units together, like shrink film around bottled water - to reduce or eliminate plastic use without sacrificing transit performance, and typically without requiring new capital equipment.
What are alternatives to shrink film for bottled water collation?
Alternatives fall into three categories: changes to the primary bottle structure itself, changes to the secondary collation method while keeping the bottle unchanged, or an integrated redesign of both the bottle and its collation system together. The right choice depends on how much flexibility exists in the existing product format and equipment.
Can shrink film be eliminated without new capital investment?
Yes, when the evaluation is scoped specifically around existing equipment and line capability from the outset. This case evaluated 15+ format combinations with that exact constraint built in, rather than assuming new machinery as a starting point.
How long does a packaging format evaluation like this typically take?
Timelines depend on the number of formats under consideration and testing requirements, but a structured three-tier evaluation can be run within an existing product launch schedule - this engagement delivered its recommendation within the program's committed timeline, without introducing delay.
