Plus Pack is a food packaging company based in Odense, Denmark, committed to delivering circular food packaging with a true net zero impact. Since its founding in 1914, Plus Pack has been driven by the motto "The drive to make a difference." The company aims to help customers protect and showcase food while using fewer of the planet’s resources.
Bastian Fietje, Head of IT and Digitalisation at Plus Pack, has played a prominent role in driving the company’s digital transformation journey. In this Q&A, Bastian shares insights into Plus Pack’s current projects, tips for success, plans for AI, and future strategies.
Can you tell us about Plus Pack and your current digital transformation journey?
We’re a medium-sized, family-owned company that’s been around since 1914. Today, we design, produce, and sell food packaging solutions worldwide. Over the last 3-4 years, we’ve invested heavily in new technologies and IT systems to improve operations and deliver more digital value, not only internally but also to our customers.
We see great potential for evolving our business. It’s not just about optimising how we run operations but also positioning ourselves differently in a competitive market. We aim to use new technologies for short-term efficiency gains and long-term value creation.
Our key business areas are aluminium and plastic packaging for applications like frozen, cold and warm food and ready meals. It’s essential that we provide top-quality products that are protecting food, are fit for purpose, and can be reused where possible and recycled after use. As a Danish company, we use our heritage to emphasise quality, design, and manufacturing. However, balancing cost is a constant challenge, so we focus on using technology to deliver both physical products and value-added services.
In our strategy “Circular”, we aim to further transform food packaging towards circularity. We want to use our experience within food packaging to support the transition from a linear economy to a more circular economy. We have clear targets on increasing circular sales, reducing CO₂ emissions, ensuring motivated employees with a high well-being, achieving high customer satisfaction and strong financial results.
Food packaging has become a symbol of single-use consumption, where products are only used once, and materials are wasted after use. This needs to change to ensure more responsible consumption and production. It’s challenging because, on one hand, we as consumers know we need to reduce and recycle materials, especially plastics. On the other hand, we as consumers don’t always make rational choices.
We continue to invest in new circular products made from materials that fulfil common requirements set by existing design guidelines for reuse and recycling. However, some consumers still perceive paper, carton and compostable materials as more sustainable than aluminum and plastic, even though they’re difficult to recycle.
So, how can technology help us to improve how we share knowledge with customers, engaging and inspiring them to increase circularity in the food packaging sector?
Bastian Fietje
Head of IT and Digitalisation at Plus Pack
We aim to use new technologies for short-term efficiency gains and long-term value creation
When you talk about inspiring customers, are you referring to the end consumers or the companies that use packaging solutions like yours?
It’s both. Our products are sold in segments like industry, food service, horeca and retail. We work with customers, suppliers, end-users and other relevant stakeholders to identify optimisation opportunities in specific packaging solutions that enhances food’s appeal in the marketplace while reducing its overall environmental impact.
Our output management project plays a key role here. A few years ago, we decided to invest more into our customers digital experience by adding a new dimension to the existing product experience by utilising digital possibilities.
We saw a growing demand from customers for improved product data, as it becomes more business critical for our customers to have the right data about their products and an increased precondition for collaboration. To address this, we introduced a new way of browsing products online, making it both easier and faster for our customers to find exactly what they need and with even more relevant product and sustainability data.
Using Interform for output management, we improved the digital product experience by offering a new technical data sheet with enhanced product information and a new declaration of compliance needed for decision making and reporting. With Interform we were able to combine data from our product information management system and ERP system into a single format and distribute it efficiently, with flexibility for future needs.
Our new output management platform has already become vital for us, and we’ve received positive feedback from customers both on the design and enriched product information. With the increased data points, we recognised the need for a centralised system to handle all outputs efficiently. Whether it’s a printed document, a label, a technical document, or a proposal, we aim to use one system for everything, streamlining processes and providing flexibility for future growth.
Our competitive edge comes from building stronger connections with customers, offering not just products but services like improving the exchange of product information or optimising our customers goods receiving.
Was managing the data a challenge, especially in making it clear and useful for both customers and internal stakeholders?
Yes, it was a two-step process. On one hand, we worked hard to restructure how we organise data by building new IT systems to manage it. On the other hand, it’s not enough if you can’t distribute and communicate that data effectively to customers, so we worked in parallel.
We involved our customers, asking what was important to them, what data they needed, and how they wanted it presented. We conducted discovery interviews and redesigned how we would distribute that information.
We also needed another tool to help us manage this. In the short term, we needed a solution that could be implemented quickly, as this was a key touchpoint for our customers to download documents and access data. Long term, we wanted a platform that would allow us to deliver new value propositions and opportunities.
That’s why we decided to implement an output management platform. We needed a separate solution rather than continuing with the old method of generating outputs, primarily through our ERP system, which had very limited capabilities.
The decision to invest in the output management platform was based on the business case for improving customer service and support, but also to streamline our internal operations to improve efficiency. The solution allows us to centralise all data outputs, streamline the generation of documents, and present data in a more structured, user-friendly format. It has become an important tool in helping us to deliver more tailored, actionable information to our customers with less internal resources needed and improved stability and performance.
When we followed up with our customers after the implementation, they confirmed that the changes were noticeable. While it’s always difficult to define the exact value, we see clear indications that our customers appreciate how we’ve made it easier for them to access the information they need.
We’re already identifying new opportunities to improve our position in the market by activating the data we have. In the near future, we anticipate a growing demand for suppliers like us to offer not only physical products but also the associated data in a way that’s easy for customers to understand.
With regulations like digital product passports requiring the tracking and reporting of materials at every stage, do you feel pressured to meet these demands?
Future legislation will hopefully help us move our customers to circular packaging. When I joined the company in 2016, we conducted a broader strategy review and decided that we needed to not just follow the market in terms of regulations but also stay ahead of it. We’ve been engaged both nationally and internationally, trying to understand what’s driving these trends and also working to influence them.
What we’re seeing now is what we anticipated. How these regulations will be implemented across different European countries will be interesting to follow. Some countries are more advanced, while other countries continue to postpone.
Being able to react to these varying demands is crucial for us, especially as we sell our products in more than 50 markets. I believe we can position ourselves as a strong partner - not only by providing the products our customers need, but also by helping them optimise their use of the data we provide. This could be for reporting purposes or compliance. At the same time, we’re reviewing how we can organise and distribute this information more efficiently, to avoid increasing internal costs or deprioritising other tasks.
With the InterForm output management project we initiated, we’ve already seen some benefits. While optimisations are still needed, I’m confident we’ll see a significant impact, especially given the improvements to our approach.
What other transformation projects are part of your strategy for the future?
We’ll invest further in to creating a more cohesive and personalised customer experience by enhancing the perception of our brand, products, and services. Additionally, we’ll expand the existing product experience by utilising digital possibilities – providing support in finding the right products and offering 24/7 access to product data.
Our goal is to centralise how we collect and organise data, then distribute it in more personalised and targeted ways. We'll continue to add more data points and experiment with different output formats to see what works best for customers. Some prefer printed versions, while others are moving towards digital formats and want data in different ways.
Another area we're focusing on is how we can improve and automate customer service processes and enable customers to independently resolve issues, self-service and potentially ordering without requiring our help. This is in response to the growing demand from customers who want to access what they need without constantly contacting customer support or their account manager.
We expect output management to play a key role. We're looking at how we can collect relevant data for our customers and deliver it in a unified way. This will save time internally and offer more value to customers, allowing them to access data easily.
How did you manage to gain buy-in from the board and workforce for these digital transformation projects? What advice or tips would you offer to others?
The key for me was being pragmatic from the start. If I had presented the transformation as a big, costly program, it would have been seen as too risky. Instead, we focused on identifying specific pain points and started with a narrow-scope project to demonstrate its feasibility.
Starting small helped us gain buy-in without overcomplicating things. We connected the project to broader initiatives, such as e-commerce and digital product experiences, which allowed for quick wins and maintained momentum.
To get the funding we needed, I aligned the project with our strategic goals, particularly the initiative to prepare our ERP system for the cloud. Once approved, I showed how the output management solution could improve customer value and streamline document management. I also showed how non-technical people could make template adjustments, reinforcing its value.
In my experience, connecting the first step of a project to a clear strategic value makes it easier to get the necessary support from leadership. It's also important to work with partners who share responsibility of the transformation, are aligned with your goals and are willing to invest time upfront to make sure value is delivered. This makes a huge difference.
With AI being such a hot topic, how are you approaching it, and do you have plans in that area?
We could talk about AI for another hour! To keep it short, yes, we do have plans. Right now, we’re focused on partial and conditional automation through AI assistants and copilots where people can augment their work and get decision support. But we’re also testing how we can utilise AI agents to produce actual work to better serve our customers.
I’m confident that in a year we’ll have our first AI agents deployed to produce work that supports our customers even better in finding and buying the solutions they need. While buying a tray for food may seem like a simple decision, it’s actually quite complex. There are thousands of product options, and making the right choice to fit market requirements and the value chain isn’t easy. I believe AI can further enable us to help our customers make better decisions.
We have a lot of knowledge in-house - whether it’s from our sales reps, marketing materials, or datasets. The goal is to organise that knowledge so we can use the data more effectively and distribute it in ways that help our customers better understand their needs. That’s the next step for us.
