Calbee, Japan's largest snack brand, is switching 14 products to black-and-white-only packaging starting May 25. Not because they want to. Because the printing ink is running out. Naphtha is a petroleum-derived solvent that forms the chemical backbone of most solvent-based flexible packaging inks, and it is in critically short supply. The Iran war has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz since late February, cutting off the Middle Eastern crude supply that naphtha is refined from. Japan imports 40% of its naphtha from the region. Prices have nearly doubled since the conflict began, and ink manufacturers are rationing.

Calbee is the most visible case because Japanese manufacturers moved fastest, but this isn't a Japan story. PepsiCo, Mondelez, Mars, and Nestlé all run their flexible plastic packaging on the same naphtha-dependent ink infrastructure. A March 2026 survey found 99% of global packaging manufacturers are already absorbing supplier price increases. If your packaging printer hasn't raised ink surcharges or availability constraints yet, that silence is worth breaking. Ask them directly.

Calbee chose to announce the change rather than quietly work around it. The story landed in Bloomberg, NPR, Fortune, and Al Jazeera within 48 hours. By the time the monochrome packs hit shelves, tens of millions of consumers will know the reason before they even pick one up. A supply chain constraint became a brand moment. The question worth sitting with: if a shortage forced a visible packaging change on your brand, would you have a story ready to make it an asset instead of an apology?

Source: The Dieline · Fortune · Bakery & Snacks

Most brands treat packaging refreshes and product reformulations as separate decisions, executed months apart. PepsiCo just ran them simultaneously on Muscle Milk, and the early results are hard to argue with. One major national retailer saw sales surge 30% immediately following the combined launch. That's not a minor brand tune-up. That's what happens when you change the product and the packaging promise at the same time.

The reformulation was substantive. Muscle Milk stripped its legacy formula, a complex blend of calcium caseinate, sodium caseinate, and heavy oil powders, down to a single foundation: ultra-filtered milk. No artificial sweeteners. No artificial flavors. No added colors. Protein content went up (26g standard, 42g Pro line, 33g in the 11oz bottle). The ingredient list got shorter. The nutrition profile got cleaner. That matters because the packaging's job is now to tell a simpler story.

The new design reflects it. Gradient tones replaced the heavy gym-performance aesthetic. Protein content and flavor moved to the foreground. The visual language shifted from "this is what serious athletes drink" to something more accessible, explicitly targeting a broader audience of "busy on-the-go parents" alongside the core fitness consumer. That's a meaningful positioning move in a market where Premier Protein and Coca-Cola's Core Power are fighting for the same shelf space.

The move that matters here isn't that PepsiCo rebranded and reformulated simultaneously. It's the logic behind the sequence. Muscle Milk didn't update its packaging to look fresher. It updated packaging because it was selling a different product to a different audience, and the old visual language would have told the wrong story to the right new customer. The design change is downstream of the strategy change.

Source: Food Dive

Maine became the first US state to mandate producer responsibility for packaging waste in August 2021. Five years later, seven states have packaging EPR laws on the books. One in five Americans now lives somewhere that shifts the cost of managing packaging waste from municipalities to the brands and retailers whose packaging created it. CalRecycle expects to collect $21–36 billion in fees from producers in the first five years of California's program alone. Oregon started enforcement last July, with fines reaching $25,000 per day. This is no longer a "coming soon" regulatory environment. It's operational.

A wave of lawsuits against the new laws has fueled uncertainty, but Olga Kachook, SPC Director at GreenBlue and author of this week's Trellis analysis, makes the historical case clearly: litigation is a standard industry response to new regulations, not evidence of rollback. Bottle bills, electronics recycling mandates, and emissions standards all faced the same legal opposition. They're all still here. The brands that wait for full regulatory certainty before acting are the ones who end up paying more, both in fees and in compressed lead time when the rules go fully live.

The three priorities Kachook identifies: don't wait (the industry already knows that film, foam, and multi-layer laminates will face the highest fees); take packaging strategy to the C-suite (EPR requires SKU-level material data tracking that touches product development, distribution, and financial planning); and stress-test your portfolio (if you built it knowing today's fee structures, would you make the same material choices?).

If California SB 54 registration (June 1) is still on your to-do list, do it this week. It's the most immediate action item. Beyond that: start collecting SKU-level packaging material data now, before it's required, because the programs that are coming will ask for it on short timelines. If your portfolio runs on film, foam, or multi-material structures, higher fees are already baked into Oregon and Colorado's approved program plans. Treat the lawsuits as noise, not relief, and plan as if the laws are permanent. History says they are.

Source: Trellis

Portland's Stash Tea, founded in 1972 and older than "functional" as a marketing category, just completed a full packaging and identity refresh by LA agency Herman-Scheer. The new look leads with bold, expressive flavor: rich color, distinctive typography, and a visual language centered on what it actually tastes like. The functional and natural-ingredient credentials that Stash has genuinely earned over five decades are dialed back to secondary positioning. In a tea aisle where every brand is racing to own adaptogens, sleep rituals, or stress relief, Stash chose flavor confidence over wellness theater.

Most functional brands spend their label real estate proving their formulation. Stash flipped it: a brand that earned its wellness credibility over decades, choosing not to spend it on the front panel. Instead of competing on adaptogens and sleep claims, the new packaging positions Stash as the brand that actually knows what good tea tastes like. For any brand weighing how much of their ingredient story to lead with, this is the rare counter-example. Sometimes the most honest signal of product quality is confidence in the experience, not a claim about what's inside.

Source: The Dieline