Packaging Dive
Packaging Dive is a Washington, District of Columbia-based online news publication covering the packaging industry. Published by Industry Dive, now part of Informa TechTarget, it reports on the materials, rules and business deals that determine how products are contained, protected and delivered around the world. Its website is packagingdive.com, and its flagship product is an email newsletter for packaging and consumer goods executives. Packaging is easy to overlook precisely because it is everywhere — in food and drink, medicine, e-commerce parcels and industrial shipping — and Packaging Dive was created to cover it as a serious business beat in its own right, where a change in a resin price, a recycling rule or a design decision can affect millions of products at once.
Launched in March 2023
Industry Dive announced in early 2023 that it would enter the packaging industry, alongside fashion and hotels, as part of an accelerated launch programme under its new owner, Informa. Packaging Dive was slated to reach email inboxes on March 27, 2023, bringing the company's business journalism to executives and decision-makers in what it sized as a $185 billion packaging industry. It was the third new newsletter Industry Dive launched in 2023, following Fashion Dive and Hotel Dive earlier that March, and its arrival brought the group's portfolio to more than thirty publications.
The founding team brought relevant experience from within the newsroom. Cole Rosengren, who had worked on Waste Dive since 2016, served as Packaging Dive's lead editor — a natural appointment, because waste, recycling and packaging policy overlap constantly. Packaging Dive editor Maria Rachal and reporter Katie Pyzyk completed the launch team. Announcing the title, Rosengren said the packaging sector was being pushed to innovate beyond the box, whether by growing e-commerce demand or by regulatory change, and that the team would deliver original reporting and analysis across the layers of the industry to help executives develop strategies around sustainability, sourcing, design, manufacturing and technology. The launches were overseen within Industry Dive by senior managing editor for new launches Thai Phi Le and the company's new-launches team, which researched market conditions and recruited journalists for each new title.
The Publisher Behind the Title
Industry Dive was formed in January 2012 in Washington, D.C., by Sean Griffey, Ryan Willumson and Eli Dickinson, veterans of FierceMarkets, an online and email newsletter publisher acquired by Questex Media in 2008. Their model — separate specialist publications, free daily newsletters, mobile-first websites, and revenue from advertising and marketing services aimed at valuable niche audiences — made the company profitable from 2013 and carried it through a majority investment by Falfurrias Capital Partners in 2019 to its acquisition by Informa in 2022, a deal with an enterprise value of about $525 million, when the company had more than $100 million in annual revenue and about 380 employees. Packaging Dive was among the first titles created entirely under Informa ownership, and company statements at the time connected the launches to Informa's existing strengths in business-to-business markets. The group described its audience then as nearly 13 million decision-makers across more than twenty industries, reading its publications and newsletters.
Who Packaging Dive Is For
Packaging Dive is written for professionals who specify, buy, design, manufacture or regulate packaging. That includes packaging executives and engineers at consumer packaged goods companies, food and beverage producers and pharmaceutical firms; managers at packaging manufacturers and converters; sustainability and procurement leaders responsible for materials choices; and the designers, recyclers, equipment suppliers and investors whose work depends on packaging decisions. The publication's own launch materials said it would examine cardboard, paper, plastics, metals, glass and other materials used to contain and deliver products for industries including food and beverage and medical products, among others.
That breadth is the point. A brand manager choosing between plastic and fibre, a converter investing in new capacity, and a sustainability officer preparing for a new reporting rule are all reading the same market from different seats. A daily publication that tracks all three perspectives — materials, machinery and rules — gives each of them context that a single-sector title cannot.
Materials and the Sustainability Question
Materials coverage sits at the heart of Packaging Dive. The industry it covers is in a long transition, driven by brand commitments, consumer pressure, retailer requirements and law, away from hard-to-recycle formats and toward materials that can be collected, sorted and used again. The publication follows that transition material by material: fibre and cartonboard, rigid and flexible plastics, aluminium and steel, glass, and newer compostable and bio-based options. It reports recycled-content goals, lightweighting programmes, refill and reuse pilots, and the design changes — labels, adhesives, inks, barriers — that determine whether a package can actually be recycled in practice rather than only in principle.
Sustainability coverage on Packaging Dive is business coverage. Stories examine what a material switch costs, whether supply of recycled feedstock exists at the needed scale, how major brands report progress, and where environmental, social and governance investment is flowing. Rosengren's background at Waste Dive is visible in the attention paid to the end of a package's life: a design celebrated at launch still has to pass through a materials recovery facility, and the publication's reporting connects those two ends of the chain.
Regulation, Extended Producer Responsibility and Policy
Regulation is the second pillar of the beat. Packaging Dive tracks the expanding body of packaging law in the United States and beyond, including state extended producer responsibility programmes that shift the cost of collecting and recycling packaging onto the companies that place it on the market, recycled-content mandates, labelling rules for recyclability claims, and restrictions on particular materials and chemicals. For executives, these are not abstract policy debates; they are registration deadlines, fee schedules, reporting duties and redesign timelines that differ by state and by material. The publication's launch team said explicitly that it would track regulations as a core subject, alongside mergers and acquisitions, ESG investment and commodity trends.
Policy coverage also explains the machinery behind the rules: producer responsibility organisations, state needs assessments, advisory boards and the negotiations between brands, recyclers, haulers and governments that determine how programmes work in practice. That operational detail is what makes the coverage useful to a compliance or sustainability team planning a year ahead.
Business Coverage: Deals, Prices and Supply
Packaging is a manufacturing industry as well as a design discipline, and Packaging Dive covers its business dynamics. It reports mergers and acquisitions among packaging producers, converters and materials suppliers; capacity expansions and plant investments; earnings and outlooks from public companies; and the commodity trends — resin, pulp, aluminium, recovered paper — that flow directly into packaging prices. Commodity reporting matters to buyers as much as to sellers, because packaging contracts are frequently indexed to those underlying markets, and a swing in resin or board prices can move a consumer goods company's costs within a single quarter.
Supply coverage follows availability and disruption: plant outages, capacity closures, import shifts and the long adjustment of supply chains built for e-commerce growth. Together with its sister titles in the Industry Dive portfolio — Food Dive, Manufacturing Dive, Supply Chain Dive and Waste Dive, among others — Packaging Dive sits at a junction where many readers' responsibilities overlap, and stories frequently matter to more than one of those audiences at once.
Design, Technology and Innovation
The third strand of coverage is innovation: packaging design, manufacturing technology and the science of materials. Packaging Dive reports on design as a commercial discipline — shelf impact, e-commerce durability, accessibility, and the structural engineering that protects products with less material. It follows advances in printing, converting and filling equipment, in barrier coatings that let fibre do work once reserved for plastic, and in digital tools, including smart and connected packaging that carries information for consumers and supply chains. New product and partnership announcements are reported in the context of those larger movements, so readers can judge whether an innovation is a pilot, a niche launch or the start of a wider shift.
Format and Role in the Industry
Packaging Dive uses the standard Industry Dive format: a free newsletter delivering the day's essential stories, short Dive Brief summaries with Dive Insight analysis, longer original reporting and interviews, and a website organised by topic for readers following a single theme. The publication also takes part in the group's events and virtual programming, including DiveLive sessions devoted to packaging. Its tone is practical and explanatory, written for readers who make specifications and sign contracts rather than for general consumers.
Since March 2023, Packaging Dive has given a fragmented industry a single daily newsroom. Packaging decisions are made inside thousands of companies, often by small teams, and the rules and markets governing those decisions have been changing faster than at any time in the industry's recent history. A publication that tracks the materials, the money and the mandates together — edited by journalists who came from the waste and recycling beat and know where packages end up — fills a gap that general business news and single-material trade titles left open.
