中文The most overlooked decision in packaging
Ask most companies where their packaging team sits on the org chart, and you will get a shrug. Finance? Operations? Marketing? Wherever there was a free chair. But Jay Gouliard — a packaging pioneer with 38 years inside Coca-Cola, Unilever, General Mills, Mondelēz and Anheuser-Busch — will tell you that shrug is expensive. Where packaging reports decides its budget, its influence, and whether your best ideas ever see a shelf.
In a recent conversation with Packaging Digest’s Lisa McTigue Pierce, Gouliard laid out the case with the calm authority of someone who has lived both sides of it.
Report to R&D, as an equal
His core argument is simple: in most consumer packaged goods companies, packaging should report through Research & Development, and it should be an equal partner in product development — not a service bureau summoned at the end.
The reasoning is structural. Packaging innovation runs on a completely different clock from a recipe tweak. A new format can take 18, 24, even 36 months — capital requests, approvals, equipment build and install, line validation. “You really have to have a seat at the table from day one if you really want to make sure that your packaging innovation sits right alongside the product innovations that are going into the market,” Gouliard said.
Miss that seat and you get the familiar disaster: a product is ready to launch in six months, and someone remembers packaging exists. Then begins a frantic, compromised scramble that ships a worse package than the one customers deserved.
Mirror the business, or lose the thread
Gouliard’s second principle is that the packaging organization’s internal shape — by category, business unit, or region — should dynamically mirror the company’s own structure. The goal is the shortest possible communication line and the least possible complexity.
At Mondelēz, where he spent his later years, the company ran on a business-unit model, so packaging aligned to business units: packaging leaders supporting each BU, still reporting up through the R&D function. Flexible, legible, fast. When the business pivoted from category to region, packaging had to be nimble enough to pivot with it. “Packaging organizations need to be nimble enough and flexible enough to adapt to what the business needs are,” he said.
The spider in the web
His favourite metaphor is the starkest: “packaging is like the spider in the web.” A packaging leader must maintain a dense, living connection to purchasing, supply chain, marketing, sales, product development, quality, and regulatory affairs — almost every function at once. Get isolated, and you lose the market signal that makes packaging strategic instead of decorative.
The best packaging leaders, he noted, do not just sit in the R&D leadership team. In some companies they reach the officer core — the executive inner circle — with a direct line to the CEO and even the vice chairman. That is where packaging stops being “the thing we print the logo on” and becomes a lever for growth and cost savings.
Why this is not academic
Gouliard remembers the other path clearly. Early in his career, packaging had no seat. It was an afterthought, pulled in late, its innovation impact capped before it began. The cost of that marginalization is measured in missed launches, wasted capital, and brand moments left on the table — like Coca-Cola’s 250ml glass bottle, itself a brand icon born from packaging sitting at the strategy table.
The upside of doing it right is just as concrete: strategic alignment with the business, protection for those 18-to-36-month innovation timelines, a three-to-five-year forward view of new platforms instead of constant firefighting, and maximum brand leverage from day one.
Six things to actually do
If you run or influence a packaging function, Gouliard’s blueprint boils down to:
- House packaging in R&D and write its equal standing into the structure.
- Adopt holistic product development so packaging is embedded from the first innovation plan.
- Mirror the business — let packaging’s internal lines follow the company’s real shape.
- Fight for the executive seat — R&D leadership at minimum, officer core when you can.
- Build a nimble culture that reshapes itself as the business reorganizes.
- Plan on long cycles — budget equipment and validation two to three years out.
None of this is glamorous. But Gouliard’s point, earned across five of the biggest CPG names on earth, is that the org chart is not paperwork. It is the difference between packaging that leads and packaging that waits.
Source: Packaging Digest — “How Should Packaging Departments Be Organized and Why?” (3 September 2026).
