麦肯锡-2025年包装的可持续性：全球消费者的内心世界（英）

June 2025Packaging & Paper PracticeSustainability in packaging 2025: Inside the minds of global consumersDespite some common global themes, consumer priorities and perceptions toward packaging materials vary by country, requiring a granular understanding and nuanced planning from packaging stakeholders.This article is a collaborative effort by Daniel Nordigården, David Feber, Felix Grünewald, Markus Pley, and Matthew Seidner, with Mark Conrad, representing views from McKinsey’s Packaging & Paper Practice.The years since 2020 have been a time of upheaval for consumers and companies alike, and packaging players are no exception. A global pandemic shifted consumption patterns,1 many countries went through a period of high inflation,2 and geopolitical uncertainty continues to reshape trade flows3—sometimes profoundly. How have these factors affected the choices consumers make and especially their attitudes and sentiments toward packaging? To answer this question, in the first quarter of 2025 we launched another round of our comprehensive survey exploring consumers’ attitudes toward packaging. We have been conducting this research globally with tens of thousands of consumers since 2020, and this survey round encompasses more than 11,000 respondents from 11 countries4 that together represent four continents, 66 percent of global GDP, and 50 percent of the world’s population.5 This survey addresses consumer preferences across product categories, packaging substrates, and sales channels, and it offers granular insights by demographic group (such as income level, geography, gender, and age) within each country, though analysis in this article is mostly presented at the country level. In addition, this survey round included a number of questions that were also used in 2020 and 2023, which allows us to look at trends over time.6 Five key findings emerge: Two relate to the factors most important to consumers overall when making purchases and when considering packaging, and the remaining three provide detail on consumer attitudes toward sustainability. First—and consistent with previous survey rounds—price and quality remain the most important product characteristics that influence consumers’ purchasing decisions, with price even more important when compared with previous years. Environmental concerns rank significantly lower across product categories, though some European countries (including France and Italy) place higher importance on environmental impact. Second, food safety and shelf life have remained the most important packaging characteristics that influence consumers’ purchasing decisions, and the importance of environmental impact has once again ranked at a much lower level. Notably, however, consumers globally do not care less about the environment today than they did in the past; the absolute proportion of the survey sample who deem it important has stayed fairly flat. Rather, consumers have started to care more about a number of other factors