Packaging World: The Flagship Magazine of PMMI Media Group
Packaging World, based in Chicago, Illinois, is the flagship title of PMMI Media Group and describes itself as the world's best-read publication for professionals who use, recommend and purchase packaging equipment, materials and services. Founded in 1994, it serves the people who design, run and manage packaging operations for consumer packaged goods companies — food, beverage, pharmaceutical, personal care and household products manufacturers — through a monthly print magazine, its website at packworld.com, newsletters and events.
The magazine's formula, set by its founding editorial team, combines in-plant case studies showing how specific companies solved packaging problems with issues-oriented reporting on what the industry is thinking: materials pricing, contract packaging, line integration, sustainability, regulation and the role of distributors. That combination of practice and perspective quickly made it, in its publisher's words, the most respected packaging media brand in the world, and it remains the centrepiece of the media arm of PMMI, the Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies.
Launched in 1994 by a Founding Editorial Team
Packaging World was launched in 1994. A key figure in its creation was Arnie Orloski Jr., who had joined Packaging Digest in 1977 as its first real field editor and had remade that magazine around in-plant case histories — taking readers behind the scenes in packaging operations through writing and photography. In 1994 Orloski became the chief editor behind Packaging World's launch, carrying the case-history method with him and adding the issues-oriented and survey-based reporting that distinguished the new title.
Pat Reynolds was part of that founding editorial team and became the magazine's defining editor. When PMMI Media Group announced his successor in 2017, its president and publisher Joe Angel credited Reynolds's editorial integrity and experience, from the launch onward, with a direct impact on making Packaging World the most respected packaging media brand in the world. Reynolds remained with the title as editor emeritus, continuing to contribute reporting and insight after the transition.
The Reynolds Succession
In January 2018 Matt Reynolds succeeded Pat Reynolds as editor of Packaging World. Matt Reynolds had served PMMI Media Group as director of custom media, content and research and, from 2015, as editorial director of the group's Packaging + Processing OEM magazine. His background spanned more than a decade in journalism and editing, including Baking Management and Modern Baking and technical writing for machine tool and fabrication publications. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois and a master's degree in journalism from Roosevelt University.
The appointment was notable inside the industry because it joined two kinds of continuity: the new editor shared a surname and a mentoring relationship with the founding editor — Pat Reynolds tutored the transition as editor emeritus — while bringing a digital- and research-centred brief from his content and custom media roles. Matt Reynolds has since become one of the packaging industry's public voices on recyclability and extended producer responsibility, speaking for the magazine's Packaging Recycling Summit in describing an industry at a critical juncture, with producer-responsibility mandates expanding and recycled-content targets becoming more ambitious.
PMMI: The Association Behind the Brand
Packaging World's publisher, PMMI Media Group, is the media division of PMMI, founded on August 21, 1933, when 35 packaging machinery businessmen who had met in Buffalo, New York, incorporated an association to represent their industry in the era of the National Industrial Recovery Act. When that act was struck down in 1935, PMMI reinvented itself as a forum in which machinery builders — previously individual inventor-entrepreneurs designing to each customer's requirements — could work together and standardise their field.
Today PMMI represents more than 1,000 North American manufacturers and suppliers of equipment, components and materials, plus providers of related services to the packaging and processing industry. PMMI Media Group connects manufacturers with solutions, trends and innovations year-round through brands including Packaging World, ProFood World, Healthcare Packaging, OEM, Contract Manufacturing and Packaging, and Mundo EXPO PACK. Packaging World is the flagship of that portfolio — the broad, cross-industry title around which the more specialised brands are arranged.
PACK EXPO and the Show Ecosystem
PMMI held its first PACK EXPO trade show in Cleveland in 1956, with 136 exhibitors and 5,000 attendees; the modern PACK EXPO International in Chicago draws on the order of 2,000 exhibitors and tens of thousands of attendees. The PACK EXPO portfolio now includes shows in Las Vegas, the eastern and southeastern United States, and Mexico, and the magazine's editorial calendar moves with it: pre-show coverage, reporting from the floor, and post-show analysis of the machinery and materials introduced there.
The relationship is visible on the show floor itself. At PACK EXPO International 2026, Sustainability Central is presented by Packaging World, hosting sessions on future-ready packaging and reducing packaging footprints, alongside innovation stages addressing artificial intelligence, predictive maintenance, end-of-line automation, two-dimensional barcodes, extended producer responsibility and supply-chain resilience. A magazine presenting a show destination, rather than merely covering it, illustrates how completely the brand is woven into its association's events.
What Packaging World Covers
The magazine's coverage follows the packaging line from design to end of line. Core subjects include packaging machinery and automation — filling, capping, cartoning, case packing, palletising, robotics and inspection — packaging materials and containers, package design, and the controls and software that integrate a line. Case studies show applications in working plants: how a food manufacturer handled a format change, how a pharmaceutical packager met serialisation requirements, how a beverage company lightened a container or converted to a new material.
Around the machinery sits the strategy layer the founding editors insisted on: e-commerce packaging, regulatory developments, sustainability strategy, workforce questions and original research into what packaging professionals are planning and buying. Its publisher summarises the mix as case studies, applications and original articles on design, e-commerce, automation, regulatory topics, strategies and trends that are enhancing packaging across all industries.
Sustainability and the Recycling Agenda
No topic has grown faster in the magazine's pages than packaging's end of life. Packaging World's editors produce the Packaging Recycling Summit, held in June 2026 at Rosemont, Illinois, near Chicago, with a programme built around package design for recyclability, materials innovation and post-consumer resin integration, consumer behaviour, extended producer responsibility policy and compliance, collaboration with materials recovery facilities and reprocessors, sorting technology, and creating end markets for recycled content. The summit was designed for more than 600 decision-makers actively implementing recyclability solutions.
In print and online, the same agenda appears as reporting on producer-responsibility mandates moving from proposal to obligation in state after state, recycled-content targets, and the redesign work those rules trigger at brand owners. For readers, the magazine functions as a translator between packaging engineering and packaging policy — explaining not only what a regulation says, but what it means for a film structure, a label adhesive or a line's changeover schedule.
Audience and How It Is Used
Packaging World's readers are the decision-makers of the packaging function: packaging engineers, plant and operations managers, package designers and the executives who approve capital for lines. The publisher positions the title for professionals who use, recommend and purchase packaging equipment, materials and services — the three verbs that define business-to-business media value — and supports that audience with the monthly print edition, a continuously updated website, newsletters and a substantial video presence.
Practically, readers use the magazine in three ways: to benchmark their own operations against the case studies of peer companies, to prepare capital decisions by following machinery and materials development between PACK EXPO cycles, and to stay ahead of the regulatory and sustainability requirements that now shape packaging specifications as powerfully as cost or shelf appeal.
Place Among Packaging Media
Chicago has long been a centre of American packaging publishing, and Packaging World's Chicago base — the city listed in this directory — places it near both PMMI's show home at McCormick Place and a dense cluster of packaging suppliers and brand owners. Within a crowded field of packaging titles, the magazine's advantages are structural: a founding editorial formula built on witnessed, in-plant reporting; three decades of accumulated case-study archives; and ownership by the association that runs the industry's largest trade shows, giving its editors unmatched access to the machinery introductions and industry leadership that drive its subject.
Founded in 1994 by journalists who believed packaging deserved reporting about what packagers think as well as what they do, Packaging World remains the flagship voice of PMMI Media Group — a monthly record of how the products the world buys get wrapped, boxed, sealed, coded and shipped.
