Lucy Shepherd: Head of Packaging at Warburtons

Lucy began her career as a graphic designer, creating artwork for packaging, and soon gained more technical understanding of structural design and materials, specifically on how the products represent values of a brand on the supermarket shelf and provide a positive experience to the customers. Lucy worked with industry giants, global firms, like Coveris, Bakkavor and Saica, before taking on the role at Warburtons.

Impact from the Collaborative Group

Lucy found working with the other members of the collaborative group highly interesting, especially hearing diverse viewpoints across the retail supply chain, on challenges and on how other firms approach solving them. Futures & Foresight has been particularly useful, Lucy says: "I took a lot of learnings from it and still talk about it with people often, by asking about how we consider different eventualities."

Limitations in Future Planning

Lucy reflects that one of the biggest challenges that Warburton faces is uncertainty about the sustainability legislation, which appears to be ever-changing. In her role, she is required to ensure the brand meets the demands of policies such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and the Packaging & Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). In addition, she needs to stay ahead of the mandatory legislation and be able to predict what the packaging regulatory landscape is likely to look like in the future, and how EPR will affect the recycling practices of businesses and British households. This anticipatory orientation is where the Futures have proven useful.

She also highlights how beneficial ‘futuring’ is in the current regulatory landscape, with businesses trying to embed environmental packaging strategies with a certain amount of ambiguity. Recent legislative changes are having a considerable economic impact on the industry in a drive to provide positive systematic change, one which Warburtons supports to deliver better funded and simpler recycling initiatives to aid consumers, improve national recycling systems and promote material circularity. 

"As a business, we rely on being as efficient as we can, where we try to be prepared for what the future brings around new technology, materials and legislation."

Warburtons Long-Term Vision

Warburtons, as a family firm has strong values, its 'Responsible Business Plan' being one its key objectives. This means that the company makes strategic decisions based on what is right for them and the planet. The brand adopts sustainable targets, looking to make all the materials they use recyclable, and applying ‘lightweighting’ techniques to packaging by eliminating unnecessary components without compromising quality or performance for their products.

A recent initiative looked at material innovation, down-gauging polyethylene bags, by two microns, which saved 173 tonnes of plastic from the market. Another packaging project investigated using recycled content in flexible bags, whilst maintaining performance and quality. As a result, they put 30% of post-industrial recycled plastic into the packaging materials, saving what Lucy estimates is over a thousand tonnes of virgin plastic from being used since its introduction in 2023. She notes with encouragement that: "Even small changes have a large impact."

Another sustainable action in the bread industry is the use of reusable baskets - rigid plastic crates that store, transport and display goods in supermarkets. In addition, such a solution is reusable and saves carbon and materials along the supply chain while being traceable, fast and economical - creating a fantastic example of a circular system for the transportation and sale of bakery goods.

Paper vs Practicality

With Warburtons aiming to use recyclable packaging solutions whenever possible, Lucy notes that using alternative materials is not without issues, and that "paper comes with a lot of challenges for the business." Due to the nature of bakery goods, which are soft and contain a lot of moisture, it's important to protect the product to eliminate damage or waste of food. In their range of breads, the brand uses waxed paper wrappers, which offer barrier properties to the product, providing it with extended shelf-life and freshness, offering customers the ability to enjoy the product for five or six days, the same as if it’s bought straight from the bakery. Such solutions show how effective the right packaging can be in extending the shelf-life of products and eliminating waste from breads, which can be significant in household.

Overall, in this food category, plastic is preferred due to incomparable barrier properties it offers, but also the speed of operations and packing process, which paper can’t always keep up with. Still, Warburtons remains committed to innovating in new materials and technologies, which could result in the same performance but greater mainstream recyclability than flexible plastic.