The Sustainable Packaging Paradox : Navigating Trade-offs and Decision-Making in the Nordic Food Industry

Sammanfattning

Background: Food packaging functions, including protection, cost, marketing, and sustainability, frequently conflict and create paradoxes (Cichosz et al., 2025; Pålsson & Sandberg, 2022b). How F&B companies resolve these paradoxes in practice remains underexplored. The Nordic food industry, shaped by PPWR pressure and concentrated retail, provides a relevant context. Purpose: To identify how Nordic F&B companies resolve packaging paradoxes and what factors shape their resolution strategies. Method: Qualitative interpretivist study. Semi-structured interviews with nine Nordic F&B companies. Gioia methodology: 23 first-order concepts, resulting in 8 themes grouped into 3 aggregate dimensions. Conclusion: Companies combine multiple resolution strategies. Defensive resolution dominates, but it is not always cost-driven, as brand values can override cost considerations. Spatial separation applies when physical or categorical product differences exist. Synthesis is rare and typically appears to be a by-product of efficiency gains. The dominant pattern is threshold-driven synthesis, where firms first secure a non-negotiable threshold, such as food safety or an acceptable cost ceiling, and then optimize the remaining demands within the constrained space. Sustainability was never found to be a non-negotiable threshold. Resolution is shaped by imposed constraints, machinery lock-in, design guidelines, and regulations. These factors define the decision space before navigation begins. PPWR uncertainty drives firms into either suspension or proactive guessing, depending on how reversible the decision is.