Sonoco
Driving Innovation in Packaging

It doesn’t come as a surprise that a product packaging plays an important role in the consumer decision. Some would argue that the packaging could be as important as the product itself given that it's a crucial marketing and communication tool for one’s business. It significantly responsible to drives a customer’s viewpoint over a particular brand or a product item, this making it a critical factor of business. Realizing its vital role the value addition it can provide for a business, retailers and businesses have been embarking upon innovative and user appealing packaging models and designs that have proven to be widely successful in retaining the customers and have also attracted several new ones with a new facet of the marketing through packaging. Spearheading this phase shift of the modern day retail is Sonoco – a global supplier of innovative packaging solutions that brings more to the table for its customers than ‘just the package’.

Sonoco is a global provider of a variety of consumer packaging, industrial products, protective packaging, and displays and packaging supply chain services. Over the years, the company has grown to be the world's largest producer of paperboard containers, and a leading manufacturer of tubes and cores; convenience closures; consumer and industrial thermoformed plastic packaging; engineered molded and extruded plastic products; protective, temperature and retail assurance packaging. With annualized net sales of approximately $4.8 billion, we have 20,000 employees working in more than 300 operations in 33 countries, serving some of the world's best known brands in some 85 nations.

Tracing back its roots to the year 1899 where it was initially established under the name of Southern Novelty Company. The company’s first product was a cone-shaped paper yarn carrier used for winding and transporting yarn. Since most of the textile cones back in the day used to be wooden, paper cones were a novelty. The Company soon became the leading producer of cones in the United States.

The Southern Novelty Company continued to diversify its product line and add new operations around the country.

In 1923, the Southern Novelty Company name was changed to Sonoco Products Company, or "Sonoco," using the first two letters from each word of its original name. Since then, the organization has continued growing, and is now a multi-billion, global business with four segments: Industrial, Consumer, Protective Solutions and Display and Packaging.

Sonoco was created to serve industrial sectors, because of which the company commands a profound understanding of what its customers are up against and what they need to be successful

Today, widely recognized by a multitude of third-party organizations for its corporate citizenship, Sonoco has been listed multiple times in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index. Recently, the company was named as one of the 25 Top Companies for Leaders in North America by Aon Hewitt besides being listed as one of the World’s Most Admired Companies by Fortune magazine and America's 100 Most Trustworthy Companies by Forbes magazine.

Product and Services Portfolio

For consumer brands to capture market share at retail, they need to understand the intricacies of developing packaging that gives the brand a voice and a look that appeals to shoppers scanning a sea of tedium. Packaging that delivers merchandising and functional appeal can make the difference between winning and losing on the shelf. And packaging that delivers both, while also delivering manufacturing efficiency creates a win-win situation for the brand. This requires a diverse range of solutions and that is exactly the kind of value that has a diverse range of packaging and services to get you there.

Industrial markets are demanding. Toughness, precision, flexibility, resourcefulness - all are attributes that need to be built into products and services needed to perform under demanding conditions. Sonoco was created to serve industrial sectors, because of which the company commands a profound understanding of what its customers are up against and what they need to be successful. With that knowledge, we've developed a wide range of solutions to help them achieve their goals.

Moving your products from the manufacturing floor to the retail floor, and everywhere in between, requires a diverse range of protective packaging solutions.

Whether you are making and transporting durable goods like refrigerators, washers or electronics, shipping valuable pharmaceuticals or biologic products, or integrating materials to make automotive components, we have a protective solution to prevent damage, while ensuring product integrity throughout the rigors of the distribution cycle.

360 Degree Customized Solutions

Today’s retail market is more challenging than ever. Reaching diverse shoppers requires a diversified solution. Our customized, packaging-neutral approach connects insights to innovation, developing 360º Customized Solutions tailored to our customers' goals and objectives.

Over the past 3 decades, the average supermarket has gone from carrying 9,000 products to nearly 47,000. Additionally, the average consumer in the United States is exposed to over 1,000 advertising messages and impressions each day. Despite the thousands of messages and products to choose from, the average shopper only purchases 0.7 percent of available UPCs in the supermarket over an entire year of shopping. Sonoco brings its customers a well-designed, customer-focused solution as a key tool to engage with the overwhelmed consumer. The company follows an approach of solving its customers’ biggest challenges by aiming to connect insights to innovation and developing 360º Customized Solutions that are tailored to the customer’s goals and objectives.

Innovation at the Core

Innovation is the catalyst for growth for most companies today. And while intellectual capital and creativity are important, bringing to life ideas that work in the real world requires a process to guide and nurture these ideas to fruition. Sonoco’s unique i6 Innovation Process^® allows the company to harness the power of ideas in the service of innovation through a repeatable, scalable approach. Sonoco is able to take customers from insights to opportunities in a packaging-neutral environment that ensures the best solution, based on their unique requirements.

The company’s philosophy is packaging-neutral. Given that innovation is a daily endeavor, not something that can be achieved in a day, Sonoco believes that it can harness the power of process in the service of innovation, which is why the company has formalized a repeatable, scalable process called i6 Innovation Process. This disciplined, six-step approach uses insights as a foundation, and then marries technical capabilities to a broad portfolio of services and packaging options to develop 360° Customized Solutions^® for Sonoco’s customers.