In the age of PPWR, packaging compliance is more important than ever before. But can these processes and systems be used for more than simply proving compliance? Peter Stael, owner and partner at Across-Consult, investigates.
In an earlier article, I asked whether we might be stopping too early with PPWR. Once we know what the regulation requires from us, a checklist quickly emerges. We adapt our packaging, collect the necessary documentation and eventually we can tick the box: Compliant.
My next question, however, was: why should we stop there? Besides the drive for compliance, PPWR in my view also challenges us to look at our packaging again. Why not use that moment to think further about better packaging? Better traceability, individual identification, new services, new forms of interaction with consumers, opportunities to reduce food waste. And perhaps possibilities we do not even know about today.
My concern was that ‘sufficient for compliance’ could quietly become ‘sufficient for us’. Task completed, back to business as usual. But that would be a pity, a missed opportunity, I argued.
During the research for that article, however, a second question began to occupy me. The first question was challenging and exploratory. This second question is more uncomfortable. What do we actually know when we receive a Declaration of Compliance?
The trigger was very ordinary. In my daily work, a discussion arose about a Declaration of Compliance for a food package. Simply a customer who looked carefully at the documentation and asked a few additional questions. And those questions made me think.
The practice is often this: a converter receives declarations and technical information from its suppliers. Those suppliers have, in turn, received information from their raw-material suppliers. A film producer relies on information from producers of polymers, additives and other raw materials. A converter may add inks and adhesives, for which information from other suppliers is again used.
Eventually, a Declaration of Compliance for the finished product emerges. Such a DoC is therefore based on a cascade of declarations. And that is not wrong by definition. On the contrary: a complex international supply chain could hardly function if every link had to independently analyse every property of every raw material again and again. That would lead to an enormous increase in cost and time.
We need to be able to pass information to each other. To a certain extent, we need to be able to trust each other. But there is also a limitation in this. We know that our documentation says the packaging is compliant. How much certainty that documentation gives us about the physical reality behind that packaging is another matter.
An old problem
When I started looking at that question, I discovered something uncomfortable: the problem is not new at all. As early as 2009, Grob, Stocker and Colwell described how compliance of food-contact materials has to be built up throughout the production chain.
Their starting point was that communication through that chain is essential: each link needs to make clear which compliance work has already been carried out and which work still has to be performed by a subsequent link. They also pointed out that early in the production chain it is often simply not possible to conclude that the final material or article will be compliant.
That sounds logical. But a number of years later, researchers looked at how this worked in practice. In an official control campaign, the supply chain was followed backwards from converters to nine large producers of polyolefin granulates. Both the Declaration of Compliance and the supporting documentation on which the safety of potentially migrating substances was based were requested. The DoCs arrived. The requested supporting documentation did not.
According to the researchers, only two producers supplied limited additional information. Hardly any information was available on reaction products, impurities and other non-specifically regulated substances. Their conclusion was not cautious: there was a broad gap between the legal requirements and reality.
Apparently, the problem did not disappear by itself. In 2022, a European workshop was organised on the enforcement of compliance work for food-contact materials. Eighty-four representatives of enforcement authorities from 16 EU Member States participated.
The authors concluded that enforcement of the legal provisions for food-contact materials was weak and explicitly pointed to the complication of the long chain of business operators jointly contributing to the final material. Their conclusion for future enforcement was significant: control campaigns in which supporting documentation from multiple stakeholders in the same supply chain is examined will become important.
And as recently as 2024, the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare (EDQM) published a separate technical guide on documentation supporting the compliance and safety of food-contact materials, including a detailed checklist for supporting documentation and declarations of compliance.
So let us be careful. We do not know how many declarations in the European packaging sector today are incomplete, outdated or incorrect. We have no data for that. But neither can we pretend that the reliability of the information chain is a new or hypothetical problem. For years there have been signals that weak points can exist precisely there.
PPWR gives that information chain more weight – Regulation (EU) 2025/40 is quite clear on this point. The manufacturer may place on the market only packaging that complies with the applicable requirements of Articles 5–12. Before doing so, the manufacturer must carry out, or have carried out, the conformity assessment and draw up the technical documentation set out in Annex VII. Once conformity has been demonstrated, the manufacturer draws up the EU Declaration of Conformity.
Annex VII goes further than simply collecting declarations. The technical documentation must make it possible to assess the conformity of the packaging and must include, among other things, an adequate analysis and assessment of the risks of non-conformity. Where applicable, test reports must also be included.
At the same time, PPWR naturally recognises that the manufacturer cannot possess all of that knowledge itself. Article 16 therefore requires suppliers to provide the manufacturer with all information and documentation necessary to demonstrate the conformity of the packaging and packaging materials.
This includes relevant technical documentation. For contact-sensitive packaging, where applicable, documentation required under other relevant European legislation must also form part of that information flow.
The information chain is therefore not new. What changes is the weight it has to carry. Consider a simplified supply chain: raw-material producer → film producer → converter → food producer → retailer In reality, that chain can be considerably more complex. Inks, adhesives, coatings, additives and barrier materials may all come from different suppliers.
No single party therefore necessarily possesses all the underlying knowledge. Each link knows part of the story and may, in turn, rely on declarations, specifications or test results from parties further upstream.
Yet somewhere in the chain an economic operator must eventually be able to state: Yes. This packaging conforms. That final conformity assessment may be based on information that the declaring party did not generate itself, cannot always verify itself and may have received through several intermediate links.
What changes under PPWR is not that information has to travel through the supply chain. It already does. What changes is the regulatory weight that this information chain now has to carry.
An old problem in the packaging chain therefore acquires a new significance. The dependency on upstream information already existed, but that same information must now help support formal technical documentation and an EU Declaration of Conformity for which a clearly identified economic operator carries responsibility.
And then a retailer becomes the manufacturer
This becomes even more interesting when we look at private label. PPWR defines as a manufacturer, in principle, also the party that has packaging or a packaged product designed or manufactured under its own name or trademark. An exception applies to micro-enterprises under certain circumstances.
In Germany, we can already see large retailers taking concrete positions around that manufacturer role for private label. That does not have to be a problem at all. On the contrary. It can be a logical way to organise responsibility clearly for private-label packaging.
But a retailer did not produce the polymers, did not extrude the film, did not make the adhesive and did not formulate the inks. Moreover, the retailer is relatively far removed from manufacturing itself.
Retailers will certainly do their best to bring the necessary knowledge in-house, but my own experience with something as ordinary as print quality and colour management shows me that miscommunication between retailer and printer still occurs regularly. It often arises precisely from the distance between the theoretical knowledge available at the retailer and the knowledge that comes from the stubborn reality of day-to-day production at the printer.
And yet, as manufacturer, the retailer must be able to demonstrate that the packaging conforms. The European Commission has now made this explicit: the manufacturer remains the economic operator legally responsible for compliance, regardless of who actually prepared the EU Declaration of Conformity or parts of it.
So that retailer needs information. A lot of information, and sound information. From suppliers who, in part, again rely on information from their suppliers. That is precisely why the quality of the information chain becomes increasingly important.
We are now going to digitalise that chain. At the same time, there is increasing discussion about the digitalisation of compliance information. That is a major improvement. Digital information can be made available more easily. It can be updated more quickly. Versions can be managed. Information can be linked to products and batches. We can reconstruct more effectively where information came from.
That gives us two things that our historical flow of PDFs, spreadsheets, emails and declarations often lacks: transparency and traceability. But we should not confuse those with a third concept: veracity.
Traceability of information is not the same as veracity of information. If a declaration is incomplete, it does not become more complete because we digitalise it. If an upstream supplier has made an error, that error is not corrected because a downstream IT system automatically imports the information. If a document is outdated, its content does not become current because we attach a QR code to it.
We can therefore build a highly sophisticated digital compliance system that can tell us exactly where information came from, when it was entered, which product it relates to and which supplier provided it.
That is valuable. But precisely there, in my view, lies a greater opportunity. If we are going to build this information infrastructure anyway, why should we use it only to manage documents better? We could try to reduce the distance between documentation and physical reality. Information could, where useful, be linked to actual material flows, production events, test results, changes in raw materials, batches and deviations.
Not because PPWR necessarily requires all of these possibilities, but because the infrastructure being built for compliance may be able to deliver much more value than a green tick alone. Then we are not merely building a better system for administering compliance. We are building a system that can help us understand our packaging and supply chain better.
How precise does the connection need to be? This also gives identification another dimension. PPWR Article 15(5) requires manufacturers to ensure that packaging bears a type, batch or serial number, or another element allowing its identification. Individual serialisation is therefore not automatically required.
In my earlier article, I looked mainly at the possibilities that could arise if we went beyond what is minimally necessary and gave every individual package its own identity. From the information perspective, an additional consideration now emerges. The relevant issue is not whether batch-level or individual identification is better in the abstract. It is how precisely the available evidence needs to be connected to the physical product to which that evidence relates.
Suppose that during a production period a raw material, coating, adhesive or another element changes. We would then want to be able to reconstruct which evidence applied to which production. If a batch provides sufficient distinction, batch-level information can work perfectly well. Under other circumstances, finer granularity may add value.
The discussion therefore shifts from ‘batch versus individual’ to the relationship between the granularity of identification and the granularity of evidence.
A tray of fresh chicken
A simple hypothetical example makes the point more tangible. Imagine a private-label tray of fresh chicken. The retailer is the PPWR manufacturer of the packaging. The relevant declarations are available, the conformity assessment has been carried out and the packaging documentation is in order.
Months later, a possible contamination originating from the packaging is identified in one particular tray. The retailer may have excellent documentation for the relevant tray material, top film, inks and adhesive. But the practical question is now how precisely that evidence can be connected to the tray involved in the incident.
If all trays in the relevant batch were produced under demonstrably identical conditions using the same materials, batch-level evidence may be entirely sufficient. But suppose an adhesive was changed during the production run, a different film roll was introduced, or a relevant process parameter moved outside specification. The ability to define exactly which physical products were affected then becomes much more important.
The issue is therefore not that every tray should necessarily have its own digital identity. It is that the granularity of the evidence should be capable of matching the granularity of the physical reality that may later have to be reconstructed.
HiPP: when the physical product changes after production
A real-life event from 2026 takes this one step further. In April 2026, manipulated jars of HiPP baby food containing rat poison were found in Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia as part of an attempted extortion case. HiPP stated that this was external criminal manipulation and not a product-quality issue. Austrian authorities advised consumers, among other things, to look for a damaged lid and the absence of the normal ‘snap’ sound when opening the jar.
I referred to the HiPP case in my previous article for another reason. Looking at it again from the perspective of evidence makes it interesting in a different way. The information about a production batch can be entirely correct. The raw materials may have been correctly documented. The packaging may have been produced in conformity. The production records may be complete. And yet one physical product that eventually reaches the consumer may no longer correspond to the reality described by that documentation, because something happened to that individual product after production.
The HiPP case should not be read as an example of liability under Directive (EU) 2024/2853. It is an example of something more fundamental for this discussion: traceable and correct production information does not automatically tell us everything about the state of the individual physical product at a later point in its life.
That makes the connection between information and physical product a different question from the traceability of information alone.
Directive (EU) 2024/2853 as a stress test
And this is where a second European development becomes relevant. The new European Product Liability Directive has, in my observation, received considerably less attention within the food and packaging sector than PPWR.
Yet it becomes interesting when the two are placed next to each other. Directive (EU) 2024/2853 contains new provisions concerning evidence and the burden of proof in cases of damage caused by defective products.
Article 9 provides that, where a claimant has presented facts and evidence sufficient to support the plausibility of a claim for compensation, the court may under certain conditions require the defendant to disclose relevant evidence at its disposal. Such disclosure must remain necessary and proportionate.
Article 10 becomes even more interesting. The basic principle remains that the claimant has to prove defectiveness, damage and the causal link between them. But the Directive identifies circumstances in which defectiveness is presumed. This includes situations in which the defendant fails to disclose relevant evidence as required under Article 9. It also includes cases in which the claimant demonstrates that the product does not comply with mandatory product-safety requirements under Union or national law that are intended to protect against the risk of the damage that occurred.
I am not going to predict how courts will eventually apply these provisions to packaging. Nor does the Product Liability Directive imply that every package should be individually identified. But the Directive does provide an interesting stress test for the information infrastructure we are now going to build around PPWR.
A system may be perfectly capable of telling us which declaration belonged to a batch, which supplier provided it and when it entered the system. If a concrete incident occurs later, however, it becomes relevant how well that information can reconstruct the physical reality behind the product involved.
The fresh-chicken example shows how the required granularity may depend on what actually happened during production. The HiPP case shows something different: even perfectly correct production information may not fully describe the state of a physical product later in the supply chain. The question of the appropriate granularity of evidence therefore becomes practical. Sometimes batch- level information may be more than sufficient. In other situations, a finer connection between product, production and evidence may add value.
The Product Liability Directive does not prescribe the technical solution. It does, however, help make visible why the difference between traceable information and reliable evidence can become important.
From compliance documentation to useful evidence
This brings me back to the green tick. PPWR requires the manufacturer to demonstrate conformity and provides a system of conformity assessment, technical documentation and supplier information for doing so.
We will organise processes that allow us to do this. Supplier declarations and supporting documentation will be managed better. Information will be digitalised and linked to products and batches. And eventually the green tick appears: PPWR compliant.
That is necessary. But it would perhaps be a pity if we designed the new information infrastructure only to produce that tick.
The same infrastructure may help us identify earlier where information is missing, where supplier information no longer corresponds to a current material flow, where a change in production affects the available evidence and where a problem actually arose.
That may be relevant if the Product Liability Directive ever puts the evidence to the test. But the value does not begin in a courtroom. Better evidence can also help with quality management, supplier discussions, recalls, root-cause analysis, process improvement and the development of better packaging. The smaller the distance between our digital information and what is physically happening in reality, the more we can learn from that information. PPWR can then move from being an obligation to document compliance better to becoming an opportunity to understand our packaging supply chains better.
The same green tick, a greater opportunity
In my earlier article, I was concerned about the word sufficient. When PPWR makes clear what is sufficient for compliance, it is entirely rational for a company to tick the box and move on.
My argument was: do not stop there. Not because compliance is insufficient, but because otherwise we may miss opportunities. Opportunities for better packaging, innovation, less food waste and new functionality.
I believe the same thought applies to the information that PPWR now makes more important. We can digitalise the existing cascade of documents, declarations and supporting information and thereby improve transparency and traceability considerably. But if we stop there, we may mainly have built a better digital version of the system we already had.
The more interesting challenge is to explore how that information infrastructure can be brought closer to the physical reality of our supply chain. The Product Liability Directive gives us a good reason to think seriously about this, because reliable evidence can be of great value at a difficult moment. But it is not the only reason.
If converters, material suppliers, food producers, retailers, QA specialists and IT specialists take up that challenge together, something can emerge that goes beyond compliance management.
Then we do not only know better why a box is green. We can also use the information behind that green tick to improve our packaging and the processes around it. That seems to me a more interesting destination for all the information that PPWR is now requiring us to organise better anyway.
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