Over the holidays my sister-in-law kept insisting it is. Believe me, I hope she’s right. The word just trips off the tongue, does it not? Think about it. Wouldn’t you prefer that famous biblical passage to be about hydroambulation rather than about something so ordinary sounding as walking on water?
So why do I have hydroambulation on the brain as this enormous January issue begins to reach its readers? Because in my humble editorial opinion, the team of people who stand behind this issue absolutely walk on water. Let’s start with Creative Director Dave Bacho. Finding ways to attractively arrange as much content as this issue holds is no easy task, and it took plenty of long nights and a weekend or two for Dave to pull it off.
Production Manager Jane Kang outdid herself, too. Do you have any idea what it’s like to organize and keep track of the nearly 200 profiles that occupy our Leaders in Packaging section? A similar task had to be handled by Managing Editor Iris Zavala when it came to the many pages that make up the editorial features and news.
How about the Packaging World sales team? The magazine you hold in your hands would not carry the important sales and marketing messaging that the supply-side members of the packaging community need to disseminate if not for the hard work and dedicated followup of Ricky Angel, Leo Guenther, Wendy Sawtell, Christine Smallwood, and Liz Tierney—not to mention their (our) fearless leader, Packaging World Publisher and PMMI Media Group President Joe Angel.
Kudos, too, to the editorial team whose talented members scoured the aisles of PACK EXPO to come up with the Innovations Report you’ll find beginning on page 102. In addition to Packaging World’s very own Features Editor Jim Butschli and Senior Editor Anne Marie Mohan, we broadened our content gathering crew for this report by enlisting the help of the following:
Karen Sookne, Director of Editorial Content, Healthcare Packaging
Matt Reynolds, Editorial Director, Packaging+Processing OEM
Aaron Hand, Executive Editor, Automation World
Keith Campbell, President, Campbell Management Services
Ben Miyares, President, Packaging Management Institute
Ron Romanik, Senior Content Marketing Writer, PMMI Media Group
Some remarkable breakthroughs in machinery, materials, and pharmaceuticals are covered in this report. Be sure to circle back to our February issue for Part Two of our Innovations Report, when we tackle what PACK EXPO had to say on subjects like controls, e-commerce, IoT, and workforce development. If you’re a buyer or specifier of packaging machinery, materials, or services and you saw something cool at PACK EXPO that our team missed, please give me a holler.
Speaking of innovations, don’t miss our story about how the current trend of large Consumer Packaged Goods companies extending payment terms out to 90 days or more could stifle packaging machinery OEM innovation. These extended payment terms could put some packaging machinery OEMs out of business, or at the very least limit the OEM community’s ability to spend time on truly novel, game-changing breakthroughs. If that happens, it’s the OEM’s customers who will suffer in the long run, the very customers who, today at least, are guilty when it comes to woefully extended payment terms. If you’re among them, why not make it your New Years resolution to give some serious thought to shortening the payment terms you arrange with your packaging machinery suppliers?
