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What Retailers Actually Want from Your Packaging Team (And Why Most Brands Aren’t Delivering)

Posted on

July 31, 2026

• 

  Laura Foti

  Chief Customer Officer, Specright

Packaging Packaging Management Retail Spec Summit Specification Management

At Spec Summit 2026, I sat down with Elizabeth Wolniakowski, who leads end-to-end technical execution and cross-functional commercialization for Walgreens’ own brand consumer product portfolio. Elizabeth has spent her career on both sides of the brand-retailer relationship, from L’Oréal’s factories and corporate offices to building packaging data programs at one of the country’s largest pharmacy retailers. 

The conversation left me thinking about something packaging teams don’t hear often enough: what the retailer actually sees when they look at your product.

Here’s what stood out.

The Shelf Is Bigger Than Your Brand

It’s easy to think about your product, your package, your spec request in isolation. But the retailer is managing tens of thousands of SKUs simultaneously, across every category, format, and market. Even a relatively focused retailer like Walgreens operates at a scale most brand teams don’t fully appreciate.

That changes everything about how they make decisions. The retailer’s lens isn’t your brand, it’s the entire shelf and how it performs for their customer. Their job is to optimize the consumer offering holistically, not to advocate for any single product. Understanding that distinction is the first step toward showing up as a better partner.

Packaging Data Has Become a Retailer Requirement

Retailer influence over packaging decisions has been growing for years. But something has shifted recently: regulatory reporting requirements are now driving the ask.

Retailers are being required to report on packaging materials, plastic weight by region, sustainability attributes, and more, and the data they need often lives multiple steps back in the supply chain. It starts with your packaging supplier, flows to your brand team, and eventually reaches the retailer through an account manager who, more often than not, isn’t a packaging or product expert.

That’s a lot of handoffs. And, at each one, packaging data gets lost, delayed, or misrepresented. What arrives at the retailer is rarely complete, rarely current, and rarely reliable.

For packaging teams, this is the new reality: the retailer will come asking, and if you can’t respond quickly and accurately with your packaging specifications, you’re creating risk, not just for compliance, but for the relationship itself.

Being Organized Is a Competitive Advantage

The brands that win with retailers aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated products. They’re the ones who can answer the question.

This came up in a story I love to tell: a few years ago, we were in a meeting with a major retailer and showed a slide of Specright customers. The retailer pointed to one company and said, “That’s the only company that gives us good specs.” One company — out of an entire shelf of suppliers — that showed up prepared.

That’s the bar. And it’s not as high as it seems, because so few brands actually clear it.

Getting organized means knowing your packaging, every material, every measurement, every supplier, before the request lands. It means owning your packaging specification data instead of depending on suppliers to produce it on demand. And it means being the team that responds in hours, not weeks.

Learn how this Private Label Retailer Reduced Delays in Supplier Data Entry by 33% with Specright.

EPR Packaging Compliance is Just Getting Started

If your team has been treating sustainability reporting as a future problem, it’s time to reframe that. The regulatory wave is already here, and it’s accelerating.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations are placing new reporting burdens on brands and retailers alike, requiring detailed data on packaging materials, recyclability, plastic weight by region, and more. Conversations about ingredient bans, plastic weight reporting, lightweighting, and material restrictions are happening now across every category. Private label brands have historically lagged behind CPG on sustainability execution, but that window is closing fast. Retailers are being held accountable for what’s on their shelves, and they’re passing that accountability down the supply chain.

What does that mean practically? Retailers need to know how many grams of plastic are being sold in a given region. They need material composition data. They need to know where their packaging comes from and what’s in it. That data has to come from somewhere and if it doesn’t come from a clean, structured spec, it comes from guesswork.

Retailers are being held accountable for what’s on their shelves, and they’re passing that accountability down the supply chain. That means your packaging team needs to know:

• What your packaging is made of — by material type, weight, and layer
• Where it comes from — supplier-level traceability
• How it performs against EPR thresholds — by region and jurisdiction
• How it compares to your sustainability targets — progress, not just position

Packaging teams that have their data in order will move faster, respond better, and protect their retailer relationships. The ones who don’t will spend their time firefighting.

Learn how This Retailer is Successfully Scaling Packaging Data Collection for EPR Compliance with Specright.

AI in Packaging Is the Next Frontier, But Data Comes First

AI was a through-line at Spec Summit this year, and packaging is no exception to its potential. From automated reviews to AI-assisted label compliance checks, the manual, error-prone work that consumes packaging teams’ time is exactly what AI is built to absorb.

Think about it: for example, if your team is managing dozens of artwork reviews a week, AI doing the initial pass — checking for accuracy, flagging compliance issues, marking up changes — is a genuine unlock. The same logic is coming to packaging formulation. Just as AI is being applied to food science reformulation, the concept of prompting a packaging change, whether it’s reducing PCR content, exploring alternative materials, or modeling the downstream impact, for example it’s not far off.

But none of it works without the data foundation. AI can only deliver value when it’s built on complete, accurate product data. You can’t automate a process that relies on spreadsheets, emails, and institutional memory. The intelligence starts with the spec, and most importantly, the spec has to be right.

The packaging teams investing in packaging data management today are the ones who will be positioned to move at AI speed tomorrow.

What Packaging Teams Should Do Differently

The retailer-brand relationship has always mattered. But the combination of accelerating EPR regulation, expanding sustainability requirements, and AI-driven change is making packaging specification data more critical than it’s ever been.

Here’s what the conversation with Elizabeth crystallized for me:

Know your packaging. Every material, every measurement, every supplier in your supply chain. Not just for your own operations because a retailer or a regulator will ask, and you need to be able to answer with data, not a spreadsheet search.

Own your spec data. Stop letting suppliers be the source of truth for your packaging specifications. When they hold the data, you’re dependent. When you hold the data, you’re strategic.

Get organized before the request comes. Retailer data requests are accelerating. EPR reporting deadlines are real. The brands that respond with speed and accuracy are the ones that win on shelf and keep winning.

Build the data foundation for AI. The packaging teams that will benefit most from AI are the ones with structured, connected spec data today. Start there.

Packaging teams are at the center of product, compliance, supplier relationships, and retail execution. The data you manage, or don’t, determines how well your company shows up on the shelf, how quickly you respond to regulatory change, and how much leverage you have as a partner.

The spec is either right or it’s wrong. The brands that get that,  and build systems to back it up, are the ones that win.

If you’re a retailer and would love to learn more about the value of Specright, contact our team for a live demo.