Superior technology: a sign of the times

The central theme of the 2025 edition of the Best Packaging contest is technical and technological innovation. The award ceremony for the winners will be held on May 28 during the Ipack-Ima exhibition (May 27-30, Milan), a place and time chosen to represent the renewal and evolution of the packaging industry.

By the Editorial Staff

This year, we’d like to introduce the report on Best Packaging 2025 with an observation which has perhaps been somewhat overlooked, but which we believe is significant: the contest was officially selected by the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy as one of the representative events of the National Made in Italy Day, celebrated on April 15.

This important acknowledgement confirmed the cultural, economic and innovative value of the event, a benchmark for the Italian packaging world for over sixty years.

The Day offers an opportunity to celebrate and promote Italian identity in key sectors of the economy, highlighting the inventiveness, quality and sustainability for which Italy is unrivalled worldwide. In this context, the choice of Best Packaging 2025 as one of the official events stems precisely from the contest's ability to provide an exemplary representation of these values.

Since 1957, the award - organized by Packaging Meeting Srl and promoted by the Italian Institute of Packaging, this year in collaboration with Ipack-Ima and under the patronage of Conai and the Polytechnic University of Milan - has been seeking to highlight solutions that stand out in terms of planning and design aimed at fostering technical and technological innovation.

The finalists: values and research. The Best Packaging 2025 contest has thus reached its final, most eagerly awaited stage: the presentation of the award for “best packaging”, with the winner chosen from the competition finalists by a jury of experts. We will be covering this at due length in the following pages.

Once again, an astonishing number of quality packaging solutions in the competition - prototypes already on the market or in the process of being engineered during the year - have been evaluated according to the criteria of innovation related to improving the environmental impact of packaging, and above all, the technological solutions adopted to improve its performance. These are all projects that have been “sown” by companies in the industry that have been able to renew traditional materials and technologies, shapes and performance, offering an alternative and original interpretation of the trends set to redefine packaging in the coming years.

In a nutshell, the contest aims to highlight two types of innovation: on the one hand, solutions that stand out in terms of environmental prevention and circularity according to the eco-design mechanisms recommended by Conai; on the other, technological innovation, in accordance with the guidelines provided by Ipack-Ima. In addition, a special prize is awarded for the best design. The Jury of Experts assessed the ideal degree of fulfilment of the needs of people, operators and markets, based on the tools provided and based on data provided by companies.

The competition not only acknowledges the value of innovation in packaging design; it is also committed to promoting sustainability through special awards for the environment and design, «confirming - noted Francesco Legrenzi, director of the Italian Institute of Packaging - that packaging is now a strategic element in the production and communication chain, able to combine style, function and environmental responsibility. Monitoring innovation in technology is a further step towards publicly acknowledging the innovative value of the packaging supply chain».

NOTE The feature dedicated to the finalists of the Best Packaging 2025 contest is by the ItaliaImballaggio editorial staff, based on texts provided by the companies.