A Message from our President, North America and SVP, Marketing, Design & Engineering

Your packaging represents your brand’s identity, and it must effectively deliver the product with the experiences and functionalities consumers care about most. Achieving this begins with research—and understanding the consumer and market insights that help brands consider what inspires, motivates, and drives (different) people to make buying decisions.

Welcome to TricorBraun Beat. In this issue, we’ll continue our examination of the duality of today’s complex consumers. We’ll explore three more seeming contradictions and how you can navigate them to develop—from concept to commercialization—your perfect package. We will identify who’s driving these trends, the implications for your business, and the packaging implications you must consider to both maintain, and grow, your market share. We appreciate and care about your business—and we’re here to help you with packaging that delights consumers and drives brand loyalty for long-term sales success.

Sincerely,

 The Big Picture

As we discussed in the last issue of The Beat, consumers today are defying traditional boundaries, blurring demographic lines as they pursue products that reflect their evolving priorities. They want it all: products that are clean, responsible, convenient, beautiful, innovative—ideally, at the lowest price. Indeed, modern consumers shop primarily on value, but that doesn’t always mean cheap. Value is increasingly personal and understanding what it looks like for different people can be the difference between achieving fleeting buzz and realizing genuine market traction. 

In this complex market landscape, packaging is no longer merely a container. Rather, it’s a signal of values—and defining “value” depends more on your mindset than on any generational, income, or geographic divide. And whatever micro mindset your consumers have, the best packaging strategy to appeal to them is a forward-thinking, shelf-smart approach that designs for what they want, not just who they are. 

 value

Delivering Compelling Narratives Rooted In Transparency 

Consumers are craving radical transparency from the brands they buy. Wellness shoppers may have led the charge for authenticity and ingredient literacy, but younger consumers across categories now expect that information to be delivered clearly, and beautifully, on the package itself. And it’s not only about ingredients and traceability—it’s also about buying local. For example, one recent study found that 74% of all Canadians said they now expect to “Buy Canadian” where available.

For packaging, the challenge is to build a clean visual hierarchy that balances quick scanning with compelling storytelling. Features like QR codes and peel-back labels offer elegant ways to share deeper brand insights without cluttering the design.

 wellbeing

Category Spotlights:

• Health & Nutra: In the health and nutraceutical sector, brands such as NØØT and Just Ingredients are using clear dosage visuals and callouts to make complex claims more digestible. NØØT leads with radical transparency, even adding an “ingredient lexicon” on their website so consumers can learn more about every element of their product. Just Ingredients, meanwhile, pairs easy-to-understand labels with a deeply personal brand mission to use “real ingredients to nourish our bodies.” 
• Personal Care: Personal care brands are simplifying ingredients and incorporating graphic elements that speak to their clean formulations and brand values. Pavera’s skin care products include a breakdown of ingredients, and the company has pledged to establish a best-in-class digital traceability system for 100% of their ingredients. L. tampons boosted sales by incorporating a larger logo, colorful botanical visuals, and an improved layout to communicate the product’s key benefits. 
• Food: Food brands are rethinking their packaging to address the tension between transparency and storytelling. Marks and Spencer’s new Only…Ingredients packaging places its ingredients front and center on the label. Vermont Creamery redesigned its packaging to amplify color while communicating clearly about each product, resulting in a 29% increase in sales.

 Innovation

Innovation That Feels Accessible and Intuitive 

While experimental Gen Z and early adopter Millennials lead the pack, time strapped shoppers across all age demographics are increasingly drawn to new product and packaging formats--as long they’re easy to use. 

Packaging can bridge the gap between the novelty and familiarity by adding intuitive how-to cues and incorporating universal design elements that simplify the experience. 

Category Spotlights: 

• Home Care: In the home care market, several companies have added a simple “just add water” message to demystify refillable and dehydrated solutions. Tide Evo, for example, features minimalist, envelope-style packaging as the container for its innovative, ultra-compact detergent tiles, along with clear messaging and step-by-step visuals. 
• Health & Nutra: Jelly IV is reinventing hydration with a squeezable jelly format that taps Gen Z’s appetite for texture, novelty, and better-for-you convenience. Lemme, meanwhile, turned supplements into candy with beauty lollipops that deliver key ingredients to support skin health (including Vitamin C, collagen, and cocoa butter) in a sweet, nostalgic format that provides a gummy-saturated market with something new.

 Personalization

Bringing Personalization to the Masses 

Unsurprisingly, the generations raised on algorithms and one-click options want their products to flex to their needs. Millennials and Gen Z appreciate semi-personalized options and formats that feel unique without the cost of a bespoke product. This personalization offers brands both opportunity and risk. Consumers “want personalized relevant relationships with brands we love,” said Wendell Lansford, CEO of market research firm Wyng. “However, we also want to be in control of the data.” 

From a packaging perspective, personalization at scale can be achieved by integrating QR codes that launch dynamic, product-specific journeys—bringing the experience beyond the shelf. Pairing this with custom labels adds another layer of tailored engagement.

Category Spotlight:

Personal Care: Prose creates customized hair and skin care formulations based on answers to an online quiz. Each label features key ingredients, usage instructions, and a “made to order” tag for the individual consumer. 

Beauty: L’Oréal recently unveiled its “CellBioPrint” machine, which can produce a personalized skin assessment in minutes to help consumers take proactive steps to protect their skin. 

Food: Danone has partnered with How2Recylce Plus to demystify the recycling process of their Silk cartons by using QR codes on the package to help consumers quickly find out how they can recycle the carton in their individual communities. 

Elsewhere, the need for personalization is expected to grow as across the food, beverage, and nutra sectors as consumers demand more for their health—particularly as GLP-1 awareness has shifted what people want and need. 

Learn More

Canadian Shoppers Reshaping Shopping Behaviors

Danone Raises the Bar on Package Personalization: QR Codes Link Local Recyclers

How CPG Brands Manage Privacy and Personalization in 2025

Pioneering the Next Generation of CPG

What M&S’ New Packaging Says About Transparency

Today’s consumers are defying easy characterization and prioritizing their purchases based on seemingly contradictory trends. In working through how to appeal to these tensions and resonate with shoppers at a personal level, it’s more important than ever to design with empathy, agility, and nuance.

From material selection to format, and artwork to on-pack messaging, your packaging choices speak to features and functionality—and, yes, the tensions—that inform how people perceive the value of your product. We can help you identify stock solutions that provide a sustainable foundation or functional efficacy while addressing what consumers’ respond to aesthetically. We can design on-pack messaging to highlight how your product is innovative, clean, natural, or otherwise fits into a consumer’s life. We’re continuously exploring the world of packaging, and investing in new materials and formats, to bring you both tried and true options and packaging innovations from the US and around the world. We can also create custom packaging to reduce your carbon footprint while protecting your product and showcasing your brand story. Because when your packaging speaks directly to how people live, shop, and feel—you don’t just stay on trend, you stay in their carts. 

The TricorBraun Beat is the companion newsletter to The TricorBraun Pulse. Our newsletters are designed to keep our customers abreast of industry shifts and consumer trends—and the opportunities these shifts create for packaging—in order to help you navigate the challenges and seize on opportunities to grow your business. Gleaning insights and behaviors from these trends helps us identify and deliver packaging solutions that protect and preserve your product, resonate with consumers, and boost sales. From supply chain and operational challenges to economic and market opportunities, we are here to help you understand what’s happening and how we can work together to win.  

For more, contact your TricorBraun packaging consultant or marketing@tricorbraun.com.

TricorBraun’s proven process will guide your packaging decisions from napkin sketch all the way to the retail shelf. Click below to get started.