With the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) law, coming into effect on 12th August, European food & beverage manufacturers estimate regulatory and compliance costs already run to around 13.7% of a manufactured product’s final price [1]. That’s more than their labour costs (12.2%) or manufacturer margin itself (8.0%) [2]. As regulatory requirements are expected to further tighten through 2030, there are several steps Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers can take today to ensure compliance solutions deliver competitive advantages from day one.
What’s new?
The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation replaces the 30-year-old Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive with a single, directly applicable rulebook across all 27 member states, in force from August, 12 2026 with no grace period. From that date, manufacturers must hold a signed Declaration of Conformity for every unique packaging type they place on the EU market.
For Food and Beverage Manufacturers, buried inside it is a narrower, more technical requirement: new limits on PFAS, the so-called ‘forever chemicals’ found in packaging materials and linings coming in contact with food, capping individual substances at 25 parts per billion, total fluorine at 50 parts per million and 250 parts per billion overall for all PFAS. (Limits on heavy metals in packaging aren’t new; those already applied under the previous Directive.) It’s the part of the law most likely to catch F&B manufacturers out, because it demands increased substance-level traceability, supplier disclosures, and documentation that holds up for every product and every packaging change.
Who’s impacted?
While PPWR does not directly regulate products sold outside of the EU, this becomes a competitiveness, export readiness and supply chain transformation opportunity for those already exporting or planning to sell in the EU. Today, the UK is the main supplier of Processed agricultural Products (PAPs) to the EU, accounting for 25.6% of the EU’s total extra-EU PAPs imports. China ranks second with a 10.6% share, followed by the U.S. (7.5%), Switzerland (7.3%) and Indonesia (5.8%).
These suppliers will need greater visibility into packaging data, material composition and supply chains to demonstrate compliance. It is clear that packaging sustainability is increasingly becoming a business transformation priority that requires organizations to connect data, people and processes across the value chain.
Key opportunity to improve industrial competitiveness
Solutions that minimize manual data collection will be key to improving regulatory compliance and creating long-term competitive advantages for the business. The industrial data manufacturers already generate on the factory floor, such as batch records, material data, cleaning cycles, line performance, is largely the same data regulators now want proof of.
The challenge isn’t a lack of data. It’s the ability to ensure factory-floor data is connected in a way that turns into an audit-ready answer on demand that also supports long-term industrial competitiveness at scale. Where manufacturers most need to focus now is data transparency through the supply chain itself, information that today is still gathered supplier by supplier, largely by manual means. Closing that gap, connecting it into a single traceable digital thread through connected, AI-enabled industrial data platforms, will be key to turning available information into the audit-ready records a Declaration of Conformity and Technical Documentation require, cutting the manual work and letting the business act on production insights in near real time.
Solutions that exist
Most of this technology already exists, and much of it is already running in factories today, just not pointed at compliance. The AVEVA™ PI System, for example, contextualizes real-time process, batch and material data into the same audit-ready records that PPWR’s Declaration of Conformity, EPR reporting and substance-level traceability require, while also speeding deviation investigations and recall readiness Extending that backbone out to suppliers via AVEVA Connect gives manufacturers a way to pull material, substance and packaging data directly from supply partners into that same system, digitalizing what is largely a manual, spreadsheet-driven process today and turning it into a single, connected, audit-ready thread. Both are AI-enhanced: PI System’s infrastructure is increasingly built to process AI workloads on real-time plant data, while Connect layers predictive analytics, and agentic AI, on top of that connected data to help surface deviations and audit-ready insights automatically.
What it doesn’t do is make the judgment calls: the supplier relationships, the regulatory interpretation, and the sign-off still rest with the compliance and quality teams who understand the product and evolving requirements.
Industrial AI take-up for compliance remains low
While Industrial AI offers a step forward, our “Beyond the Hype: Practical AI for Competitive Consumer Goods Manufacturing” study reveals that only 37.9% of F&B manufacturers in Europe say AI plays a significant or critical role in their packaging compliance, and 35.3% leverage it for PFAS compliance work [3]. As PPWR won’t be the last regulation to demand a considerable level of reporting granularity over the next few years, investment in industrial AI will deliver benefits over the longer-term: further PFAS restrictions are expected from the European Chemicals Agency before the end of the year, and PPWR’s own requirements tighten again through 2030.
Manufacturers who look to automate compliance and quality control through connected data flows will be in a stronger position to clear the compliance bar. They will also be better placed to treat the next rule change as a configuration update rather than a fire drill. That’s not a claim that compliance becomes easy. Regulation like this will keep demanding real expertise and real work from the people closest to the product. But it is a step toward compliance costs no longer scaling faster than the business does.
