Packaging Digest: Covering Packaging Since 1963
Packaging Digest is a business-to-business media brand headquartered in Santa Monica, California, that has covered packaging operations since 1963. Owned by Informa Markets — Engineering, it serves companies in food, beverages, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and the packaging executives, engineers, designers and developers who work for them. What began as a print magazine in 1963 now operates primarily as a digital brand — a website at packagingdigest.com supported by email newsletters, e-books, webinars and social channels — making it one of the oldest surviving names in packaging media.
Its longevity gives Packaging Digest a singular place in the industry's history. It documented the packaging profession's formation, helped invent the modern packaging magazine's case-history style in the 1970s, employed the editor who later led the launch of its great rival Packaging World, and passed through four corporate owners on the way to its present home inside one of the world's largest events and business-media companies.
Founded in 1963
Packaging Digest started as a print magazine in 1963, when packaging was becoming a distinct engineering and management discipline inside food, pharmaceutical and consumer-goods companies. Postwar supermarkets, self-service retail and national brands were turning the package into a primary selling and protection system, and the new magazine gave the people responsible for it a professional journal of their own. It carries the International Standard Serial Number 0030-9117, and general references including ThomasNet and World-Newspapers.com have listed it among the top magazines for packaging professionals.
For most of its life the title was owned by Reed Business Information, part of the Reed publishing group that dominated trade media in the twentieth century. At its measured print peak it remained a substantial controlled-circulation magazine: by June 2008 its BPA-audited circulation stood at 90,045 — a figure that indicates the scale of the packaging profession it served at the end of the print era, when packaging decisions touched nearly every manufacturing business in the country.
The Orloski Years and the Case-History Turn
The magazine's most consequential editorial chapter began in 1977, when Arnie Orloski Jr. joined its staff. According to the Packaging Education Forum's hall-of-fame citation, Orloski became the first real field editor Packaging Digest had ever had, and in short order played a key role in remaking the magazine — from a product tabloid with almost no in-plant case-history content, into a magazine whose feature content was almost entirely case-history based.
That change defined modern packaging journalism. Instead of summarising suppliers' product announcements, Orloski took readers behind the scenes in countless packaging operations, using writing and photography to reveal what packagers actually do: how a line is laid out, why a material was chosen, what went wrong during start-up and how it was fixed. The approach made the magazine a practical education for working packaging professionals, and it proved portable — in 1994 Orloski became the chief editor behind the launch of Packaging World, carrying the case-history method to the new title and helping shape packaging media for the next generation. Few trade magazines can claim to have influenced a competitor's founding formula so directly.
A Chain of Owners: Reed, Canon, UBM, Informa
Packaging Digest's ownership history mirrors the consolidation of business media itself. Reed Business Information sold the title to Canon Communications in 2010. Later that same year Canon was acquired by UBM, the British business-media and events group. In 2018 Informa purchased UBM in a deal valued at $5.3 billion, and that acquisition brought Packaging Digest under Informa Markets — Engineering, its current owner.
Each transfer changed the brand's context. Under Canon and UBM it sat among medical-device, pharmaceutical and packaging titles serving regulated manufacturing; under Informa Markets it belongs to an engineering portfolio connected to trade shows and digital communities across design and manufacturing. The brand's headquarters is listed as Santa Monica, California — the Southern California base associated with Canon's and UBM's American engineering titles, and the city given in this directory listing — even as its editorial work is now produced for a primarily digital audience distributed across North America.
What Packaging Digest Covers Today
The brand's current coverage serves packaging executives, engineers, designers and developers with insight on the topics that dominate packaging agendas. Sustainability is a first-order subject: material choices, recyclability, recycled content and the design trade-offs they impose. Automation coverage follows the robotics, vision inspection and line-integration technologies reshaping packaging plants facing chronic labour shortages. Artificial intelligence — in design, quality control and supply-chain planning — is a growing beat, as is career development for a profession still defining its credentials and advancement paths.
The subject scope follows its audience's industries: food and beverage packaging, where shelf life, food safety and line speed rule; pharmaceutical packaging, where compliance, serialisation and patient safety dominate; and medical device packaging, where sterile-barrier integrity and validation are existential requirements. Across those verticals the editorial promise is operational — the brand covers packaging operations, not packaging as graphic design alone, and its features are written for readers who must run lines, pass audits and defend specifications.
From Print Magazine to Digital Brand
The reference description of Packaging Digest today lists its format simply as a website. That single word records a major transition: a title founded as a print magazine in 1963, and still auditing more than 90,000 print circulation in 2008, now reaches its audience mainly through packagingdigest.com, email newsletters that carry its reporting into inboxes, e-books that package its expertise by topic, and webinars that let engineers question specialists live. It also posts content on LinkedIn, X and Facebook, meeting a readership that increasingly encounters trade journalism through feeds rather than mailboxes.
The economics behind the change are the same that reshaped all of business media — advertising migration online, the measurable value of digital audiences, and the advantage, inside Informa, of connecting media brands to events and data products. What survived the format change is the franchise: the name, the archive and the audience relationship built over six decades. Under executive editor Lisa McTigue Pierce, listed in the brand's reference information, the publication continues to address the profession in the practical register it pioneered.
Audience: The Packaging Profession
Packaging is a profession that sits at the junction of engineering, design, marketing, regulation and logistics, and Packaging Digest's audience reflects that junction. Its readers include packaging engineers who specify materials and machinery, design and development specialists who create structures and graphics systems, operations executives who own line performance, and the suppliers and contract packagers who serve them.
For such readers, the brand's value is orientation. Packaging professionals often work alone or in small departments inside companies whose main business is something else — food, medicine, devices — and a trade publication supplies the peer community, benchmarking and technical vocabulary their own organisations cannot. That function was central when the magazine carried case histories from plant to plant in the 1970s, and it remains central in newsletter and webinar form today.
Recognition and Longevity
Third-party recognition has followed the title across its ownership changes. Industry directories have ranked it among the top magazines for packaging professionals, suppliers celebrate coverage in it as coverage in the best-known magazine in the packaging industry, and its alumni — Orloski pre-eminent among them — have been honoured by the packaging education community for shaping how the field learns from itself.
Longevity itself is a credential in trade media, where titles routinely fold or are merged away. Packaging Digest has been in publication since 1963 — through the supermarket revolution, the arrival of plastics and aseptic processing, the bar-code and e-commerce eras, and the sustainability reckoning — under four successive corporate owners who each judged the brand worth acquiring.
Packaging Digest Today
Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, and owned by Informa Markets — Engineering, Packaging Digest is best understood as a senior institution of American packaging media in digital form. Its founding generation turned a product tabloid into a case-history magazine that educated a young profession; its current generation delivers sustainability, automation, artificial intelligence and career coverage to packaging executives, engineers, designers and developers in food, beverage, pharmaceutical and medical device companies.
For a directory of American magazines, it represents a familiar modern pattern with unusually deep roots: the print object may have given way to a website, newsletters, e-books and webinars, but the editorial franchise founded in 1963 — a trusted intermediary between packaging practitioners and the technologies and ideas competing for their attention — continues intact.
