Through the Line: Packaging and Processing

What does it take for food manufacturers to move beyond checking regulatory boxes and into a fully data-driven food safety program?

This episode breaks down FDA's 2026 priorities under its reorganized Human Foods Program, from tighter scrutiny of validated preventive controls to expanded traceability recordkeeping for high-risk foods. It covers the agency's growing focus on root cause analysis, allergen and chemical hazard controls,...

What if sustainable packaging no longer meant giving something up—no slower lines, no sacrificed shelf life, no compromise?

Editor-in-Chief Matt Reynolds and Senior Editor Anne Marie Mohan preview the sustainability, materials, and equipment trends set to define PACK EXPO International in Chicago this October. Mohan shares standout innovations from recyclable pharma blisters to high-barrier paper packaging that run on existing...

What if the best healthcare packaging is the packaging no one notices?

Editor-in-Chief Liz Cuneo sits down with Melissa Carter, Principal Director of Service Innovation at Abbott Cancer Diagnostics, to discuss the process of designing sample collection kits for phlebotomists, pathologists, and patients screening themselves at home for the first time. Carter traces a career path that ran from grocery store ads to a highly regulated i...

Most pump damage doesn't happen while the pump is running. So where does it happen—and what does that mean for how a pump should be designed?

Advances in hygienic pump designs are helping food and beverage processors improve sanitation, reduce downtime, and lower total cost of ownership while protecting product quality and supporting increasingly demanding production environments.

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Green has signaled olive oil on shelf for generations. So why did Deoleo put its extra virgin in a blue bottle?

Senior Editor Anne Marie Mohan sits down with Daniele Pucchi, Global R&D Packaging Manager for global olive oil producer Deoleo, and Jose Bonache, Corporate Affairs & Communications Director for the company. They discuss  Deoleo’s approach to packaging innovation, sustainability, and product protection.&...

Why do rule-based inspection systems keep flagging perfectly good pharmaceutical packages as defective?

AI-based vision inspection is replacing rigid, rule-based systems on pharma packaging lines, cutting false rejects by learning to tell normal variation from true defects. This episode covers gains in serialization verification and environmental adaptability, plus how these systems are increasingly tying into MES and IoT platforms ...

What does it take to move a bestselling supplement out of plastic and into paper, without consumers thinking they got a counterfeit?

Senior editor Anne Marie Mohan talks with Eric Bell, principal packaging scientist at Nestlé, about the two-year journey behind Vital Proteins' switch from an HDPE container to the GPI Bordio paperboard canister. He walks through the scuffing and distribution challenges that forced a redesign of both t...

What does it take to make medical waste disposal safer, faster, and completely mess-free?

Editor-in-Chief Liz Cuneo talks with Ashleigh Hotz of SmartSolv and Victoria Robinson of Safetec about the water-soluble, biodegradable packaging behind Safetec's drop-in solidifier pouches, which let OR workers skip the cutting, measuring, and pouring that traditional packets require. They discuss how the technology improves worker safety and ...

How can food manufacturers scale innovation and reformulation efforts when a growing patchwork of state-level ingredient bans is reshaping what they can put on shelves?

Food manufacturers are using digital twin technology, artificial intelligence, and advanced automation to reformulate products and maintain profitability as state legislatures ban synthetic dyes and additives like Red No. 40 and Yellow No. 5, with several bans taking...

What happens when sustainability moves from a late-stage checkbox to a live decision-making tool?

Senior editor Anne Marie Mohan talks with Gayatri Keskar, global packaging material science leader at Kenvue, about the company's sustainability innovation profiler, a tool that lets developers weigh formulation and packaging trade-offs in real time. 

She walks through how switching OGX's bottle from PET to HDPE improved squeezabili...

How can pharmaceutical packaging help researchers tell whether a drug failed or a patient just missed a dose?

Sensor-embedded blister packs, NFC chips, and RFID tags are giving clinical trial researchers objective, time-stamped data on when investigational drugs are actually accessed, replacing unreliable self-reported adherence. The piece traces how this shift is improving data integrity and participant safety in decentralized tria...

What happens when decades-old lean manufacturing principles collide with today's machine learning push in food and beverage plants?

Industry experts break down why data standardization, not model-building, is the real bottleneck to AI-driven waste reduction, from siloed IT and OT departments to inconsistent naming conventions across plants. The piece traces real-world wins in predictive maintenance and packaging-line bottleneck diag...

How did Google reach its plastic-free packaging goal a year early, and what did the constraint teach them along the way?

Senior Editor Anne Marie Mohan talks with Joey Giacomini, packaging design engineer lead at Google, about the company's push to eliminate plastic from its hardware packaging. He explains how tackling the final holdouts—hang tabs, shrink wrap, plastic tape—led to a stronger, lighter fiber material and a...

What will it take for the pharma industry to survive the National Drug Code (NDC) Rule?

Editor-in-Chief Liz Cuneo recaps top takeaways from GS1 Connect, where industry leaders unpacked the FDA's coming shift to a standardized 12-digit National Drug Code and its ripple effects across barcoding, labeling, and supply-chain systems. The conversation also covered the expanding role of RFID and connected-product technology, and why strong...

What does it take to fix an unstable wastewater treatment system at a facility processing 2.9 billion lbs of milk a year?

Michigan State University's Anaerobic Digestion Research and Extension Center partnered with MWC, a Michigan cheese and whey protein plant, turning the challenge into a capstone project for biosystems engineering students. Together, they diagnosed fluctuating pH levels and declining sludge activity, developed a s...

What happens when a packaging engineer becomes a company's entire EPR function—with no dedicated team, no enterprise software, and just Excel?

Senior Editor Anne Marie Mohan sits down with Charlotte Ashcraft of Just Born Quality Confections. Ashcraft shares how she built a state-by-state EPR compliance model from the ground up, starting with a summer-long physical audit of the company's packaging portfolio. She explains how th...

What were the top trends and takeaways from the latest PACK OUT event?

The fifth anniversary of The PACK Out event highlighted a significant shift toward industry collaboration and sustainable development within medical device manufacturing. A primary focus of the conference was the redesign of healthcare packaging to better accommodate the complex needs of multi-user logistics.

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