Welcome to the Packaging World Video Interview series. I'm Matt Reynolds, editor of Packaging World, and in this video series we're gonna dive into the latest innovations, trends, and challenges shaping the packaging industry. From groundbreaking technologies to sustainability initiatives and operational strategies, we bring industry leader knowledge to you serving up the insights that matter most.
Whether you're here to stay ahead of emerging trends, discover new solutions, or gain a deeper understanding of what's driving packaging today, you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hello, my name's Paul Jenkins, founder and CEO of UK Packaging Innovation Consultancy at Packer. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Miguel Arevalo, head of Packaging, Sustainability and Innovation at Google.
Welcome, Miguel. Really good to speak. Thank you for having me, Paul. Appreciate it. Really. Thank you for your interest. Really excited. Good stuff. I'm really excited about the conversation we're about to have. So could we just sort of start, a little bit about yourself your sort of your route in your journey into Google and how you, you managed to get yourself into the exciting world of packaging?
Of course. So I, it has been more than 15 years now, actually. I had the opportunity to start my packaging journey when I was in Proctor and Gamble, specifically for the Gillette brand. I was there for 10 years where I. Move the journey from junior to senior and group lead for the particular team, specifically packaging, learning from many people about the intricacies of how packaging is being developed in consumer, fast consumer products.
So it has been a journey. I've been enjoying it every, every moment of it. And now moving to Google. I've been at Google now for six years and well having a great team to work with, learning from them and having the opportunity to bring my expertise on the sustainability and innovation side.
Excellent and Google is one of the most famous brands in the world without doubt, but people don't always think of. Packaging when they think of Google. So can you start by explaining what Google works on when it comes to packaging and what your role within that is? Of course. So, well, the audience may know Google.
Okay. What Miguel is doing here. Why Google is relevant about this. So at Google we also develop. For product hardware, specifically phones, our pixel brands. We have a, the home brand of the home category where in the brand nest, where we have cameras, we have doorbells, et cetera. And also we have wearables such as Fitbit and all of them within the Google ecosystem.
And now being leveraged among the technology of AI and channel AI on it. So at Google we need to pack those devices in. Those devices needs to be shipped over across the world. So we view packaging as the first physical touch point of these Google experience we're trying to make. It is not just a box, it's an extension of the hardware engineering it.
Specifically, we focus on three main pillars, sustainability, protection in an elevated user experience. My role is to bridge the gap between our ambitious environmental goals and the technical reality. I have the privilege of working alongside that truly talented team, overseeing the cross-functional effort between industrial design, supply chain, and material science.
I and of course our goal is to enable innovative solutions that help our business. Sure. But more importantly, that are appropriate for our planet. Okay, perfect. And why do you think packaging matters? Why has packaging become such an important focus for Google over the last few years and the five or six years you've been in the business?
Certainly, so just after when I arrived in 2019, on 2020, we set up a goal, a vault goal to be plastic free by 2025. The reason because as our power portfolio started to grow, as I mentioned with Pixel, nest and Fitbit, so that our. We realized that packaging is the most immediate way to demonstrate our commitment to a circular economy.
So over the last few years, consumer expectations have shifted. People no longer view luxury as shiny plastic. They view luxury as thoughtful, clever engineer that aligns a premium open experience with convenient and responsible disposal. You, so when you think about, so you talk about plastic, plastic free aspirations 2025.
So when you think about sustainable packaging at Google, plastic free is a very much part of that. But what does it actually mean in practice?
Great question. So for us, let's say doing it well means convenience for our users. So enabling them to make the right choice, the easy choice.
So the way we see it is it may be easy to make a carbon box, but it's hard to replace these plastic laminations while keeping these box pristine and being shipped across. Or removing those protective fields on the screen. When those are needed to protect the product. In practice, it means enabling.
So in what we have done, enabling a new fiber-based package here, that is going to be three times a stronger, 70% more strategy. And also if I can be able to add, can able to add recycled content so he can able to help out in the circular economy and also on any virgin fibers to use responsible source materials.
We believe convenience is key. If a customer has to wonder, can I recycle this, then I don't believe we haven't done our job. Good packaging is intuitively recyclable. It looks, it should feel and should act like paper because it is paper. It should be able to have some value in the economy after it's been disposed.
And are you able to communicate to consumers the changes that you're making on pack? I mean, I guess you're fighting. Against other messaging on the pack as well. So it's just interesting to see how you sort of tackle that. No, it definitely, definitely, well regulations are coming back and there is a lot of discussions around greenwash, making sure that companies are actually claiming what is should supposed to be claimed, but also at the same time, we need to balance around what is going to be the requirements to define what is going to be something that is.
Totally recyclable, just into recyclable as as the option here. So yes, it has been several moments where we need to really understand and take a pause to really understand what exactly is going to be meant to be. Define and recyclable, but also it's not only on the way we create the box and our technical testing and making sure that we connect with MERFs and recyclability capabilities, but also making sure that the collection or other entities that are not something that we control how they define that this is gonna be something recyclable. So it has been a journey, how we can be able to, make our own homework, making sure that we can be able to create something that can able to keep the value after the dispose, but at the same time, understanding how all these different metrics are being balanced at the end of life. So it can be able to pair on a solution that is going to be, again, truly convenient for users.
Okay, perfect. So, I mean, Google is all about insights and information. I mean, I guess you have a program where you are listening to consumers, getting their feedback about what sustainability means to them, what works, what doesn't work, things like that.
We deeply care about what our users. Expectations are so specifically every time that we want to launch a new product, we invest a lot of time and effort so we can able to talk to users, really understand what the overall opening experience would be. We do the same thing on the product side, make sure we can able to meet those requirements, but also we have a very close year about what is happening in the industry and, and being part of different organizations too, so we can able to learn also what is happening or what.
Others are doing at the same time. So we can take what it can be able to work for us and, and at the same time we can be able to develop our own solutions. In particularly what I would like to say on our side is we wanted to make sure that whatever we have learned, we can be able to share it over on an open source solution, which is the classic free guide we came up to discuss later.
But in a way, what we would like to do is democratize in a way, but we have and enable so others can to leverage format. Okay. You mentioned unboxing, and that's a really big area because packaging plays a, clearly, plays a very significant role to ensure that you communicate premiumness and quality.
So how do you balance that sort of reducing environmental impact while still delivering a brilliant unboxing experience for your customers? It's really difficult. I would imagine, yeah. And yeah, no, and certainly I think there. There are some queues that we have leveraged that exist within the consumer electronics side, so the time that is being taken so you can able to take over out the lead from the box.
Also how everything is been done by layers. So it can able to bring up these. Expectation when you are opening your box and all the different items that are inside it. So definitely that's something that we leverage, but also I think important to mention that we understand that it's a little bit different versus what maybe a fast consumer products has to enable. So in our particular case, our users, they do extensive research to really understand what is the device that they would like to buy. Because it's not cheap. It's something, it's an investment that they need to make.
Packaging is there so it can corroborate that the decision that they have taken is the right one. As you mentioned, making sure that we can help to balance the premium aspect. The opening of it. But also one thing that we also care about deeply is accessibility of it. How we can able to bring tactile signifiers across the opening experience.
So people with either a visual impairment with exterior impairment, they can able to also be able to have the same experience with they're opening the box, making sure that they can be able to find these cues by touch and yeah, again. Bringing these accessible, open experience to everyone.
Excellent. Perfect. You hinted about open source. I'm really interested in this particular area because packaging and commerce is about intellectual property. It's about beating competitive editors. And you've previously shared with me that Google open source, a lot of its packaging learnings.
I mean that's fascinating. Why is that important to you? And can you tell us a bit more about what that actually means?
It has started, I would say, with Google's Mission to make information accessible and useful for everyone. So when we took that in the hardware business unit, we decided, okay, so sustainability shouldn't be this competitive advantage.
It should be, well, we know it shouldn't be this competitive advantage. It's a global necessity that needs to. Needs to be solved. So honestly, for you, practitioners like you it's good to know that a company can achieve a goal, but knowing how they did it, the challenges that they needed to overcome the partner that they use, that's what boost professionals to meet their own goals faster.
So we decided in 2024 to release what we call our plastic free packaging design guide. So our goal was let's take that first step so we can be able to share to the work that we have learned, what we have achieved, but at the same time also, what are the things that is still we haven't solved, or the roadblocks that we found.
So the intention, we wanted to help others in their journey and ideally empower them, invite them to share their learnings too. At that time, at the end of time, what we believe is that's how we believe we can scale those solutions so it can be accessible for everyone. So ideally, people can probably pick it up from there and maybe either take some of the choices of the solution that we have created on their own, or they can share what they have learned and we can have to learn from their experience too.
Okay. And how do people access that information? They have and we have been seeing a lot of interest around, so academia specifically, they have reached out to us. They have shared that they are bringing this particular document also to their own courses so they can be able to share it to incoming professionals. Oh wow.
And also companies have reached out to us to try to learn a little bit more about how we tackle specific challenges. So definitely we are always open at the end of the guide and hopefully we can be able to share maybe a QR or a website link in here. But at the end of the guide you will be able to find an email link where we connect with people and we can really understand if there is any way we can able to collaborate with them, sharing some interests or just keeping an open discussions and hopefully we can able to help each other.
Yeah, and I guess it's a, it's a constantly evolving and updating it process as well. Our goal, so this was the first, and then we have opened another open source, not for packaging. It was more on the carbon footprint, use on hardware devices, and we're looking to enable much more in the future. So this is how we are enabling this, or we are in the sustainability data that we have, hardware enabling the industry to work more sustainable solution.
This is how we would like to propose further. But definitely in packaging the intention is as long as we can be able to learn more things that are going to be relevant for the industry, definitely we're looking to make additions of the guide, so he committed to expand on our journey.
Brilliant. Excellent. Okay, finally, so, so looking forward. Uh, what are you, would you say are you most excited about or curious to explore next? In, in, in the world of packaging?
I, there are three things I will say that are more excited for me. So far I've seen the, so I know that this is a maybe a challenging topic because it given can be able to be seen both ways.
But I'm excited to see how more scalable solutions are driven by regulatory requirements. So honestly, like those are spearhead in Europe. So setting up the baseline and raising it up, that bar makes those solutions ideally more affordable for everyone. Yes, it's not easy, so you can be able to get in on that particular goal, but as lo as those became the baseline for everyone, then everyone can be able to step from there in the start.
So we cannot move forward. So definitely I see something as a big plus. The other one, I am deeply, deeply curious about inclusive design. So ensuring our tabs and boxes are easy to open for those limited externality. In visual impairment honestly is a must do. And I'm seeing more and more companies, Microsoft, to be honest.
I'm see it was, they enable also these open source, inclusive, design document, which also start bringing the attention to that particular topic. And other companies start to. Maybe make an assessment around what if I can be able to bring or bridge on that journey. So definitely I see that's something that is a must have in our journey as, as practitioners.
And lastly, I am excited about material safe chemistry. So how we can be able to keep enabling those solutions that are right now recyclable somewhat. So we can be able to enable to be safe and it will not disrupt the circular flow. It will always make sure that it can enable to keep induced all across.
So I will say simply a package that is going to be zero waste, that can be high joy, when everyone can be able to get this amazing experience and it's going to be accessible to. Okay, brilliant. You're meeting three very different and interesting and balancing, difficult challenges there.
Balancing sustainability, user experience, and accessibility. Brilliant. Great answer. Miguel Arevalo of Google. Thank you very much for your time. Absolute pleasure.
Oh my gosh. Thank you for having me, Paul.
