We need to make sure no one tarnishes it, and that’s what we’re all about at Graphic. Okay. Talk a little bit about results. What I can tell you about this is that with Vision 2030, we’re going to bring the full force of what we built here to be able to — whether it’s innovation capabilities, our manufacturing capabilities, our execution capabilities to bear for customers. And ultimately, the end-use consumers that use them. And I believe we can actually compete with the very best consumer packaging companies in the world, for sure. For our shareholders, and Steve will talk about some of the specific financial goals, what you can count on from us is that through all economic cycles, you can expect strong financial results. I think the last few years have really demonstrated our ability to be able to do that.
The moves we’re making, we announced last night, and we’ll go forward here today. We’ll further build on that. And again, our portfolio will move with the consumer, and so it will reflect that balance and that consistency of the results. So if one side of the business is down, the other side of the business is performing well, that’s the balance we sought. That’s the companies we built the company we built, and it will be reflected in our results. That again is what it means to be a true consumer packaging company and a leader in that market. Finally, we’re going to prioritize our people and our investment in our people because that’s how we’ll stay on top. We have the company we need today to run it is here. And we’re going to bring out some of these investments we’re making in people and our sustainability and innovation process in a way that I think will give you more confidence that we can really do all the things that we’re saying and hit this ambitious set of targets that we’ve rolled out as part of Vision 2030.
Look, I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished here through 2023. I talked about the results earlier today. They were excellent against a very challenging backdrop. But our company is very different in 2024 than we could have ever imagined when we put together Vision 2025. Our innovation is stronger, it’s broader and it’s deeper. Our team has delivered through exceptionally challenging circumstances, and we’ve been tested along the way. And we’ve been tested, we have learned and we’re applying that knowledge, which is something that the very best companies always do. We’ve made excellent progress on our own sustainability program. You’re going to — we’re going to make more of it over the next 7 years as Michelle will walk you through. And again, we are a critical part of our customers meeting their sustainability targets.
Our goal is to make graphic packaging the undisputed consumer packaging company in the world in our Vision 2020 — our Vision 2030, that’s too many visions. The Vision 2030 really puts that stake in the ground today, and we’re very excited to have you here. So with that, I’m going to ask Maggie to come up, and she’s going to go in a little deeper in terms of bringing some of the things that I talked about to life.
Maggie Bidlingmaier: Good morning, everyone. I’m very excited to be here today to share with you information about the innovation capability at Graphic Packaging. As Mike just mentioned, innovation is a core component of our Vision 2030. And after my discussion today, I hope you have really 3 key takeaways. The first is the demand from consumers for more sustainable packaging is accelerating. Secondly, our innovation — our global innovation capability is competitively advantaged and ready to meet that opportunity. And lastly, we see a $15 billion sales opportunity for paperboard packaging, which gives us confidence in our path to a 2% growth in innovation to achieve our vision. As Mike mentioned, our products are in the hands of millions of customers multiple times per day.
Over the last several years, we’ve made many investments to dramatically expand our global product and our customer portfolio. We work with the leading companies and brands around the world. And with them, we meet consumers in many of life’s everyday moments. We have a great responsibility because our consumer packages are at the interface between our customers’ products and the consumer. We have to deliver on a product that meets those consumer needs while also delivering value to the brand owner. Our packaging meets consumers whenever and wherever they consume while also providing convenience, freshness, safety and a host of other functions. We understand there are many trends driving consumer decisions today, health and wellness, convenience, experience, but most importantly, consumers are increasingly concerned about the impact their decisions have on the environment.
Consumers want more sustainable packaging and 68% of them view that paperboard packaging is more sustainable than other alternatives. They’re putting a lot of care and thought into the decisions they’re making around the products and the brands that they buy and how they impact the environment. This is increasingly true for the next generation of consumers. A recent first insight shared that an astounding 73% of consumers and GenZ shoppers are willing to pay more for sustainable products. As a result of this pressure, you’re seeing that other stakeholders are driving actions. Retailers and brand owners, they’re developing their own sustainability strategies to help meet those consumer expectations to support their own environmental visions while also navigating a very changing regulatory environment.
This regulatory environment in the Americas is accelerating, really being primarily led by areas like Canada as well as the coastal regions. And then there are materials like foam that are clearly gaining much broader adoption across the Americas. Leading the way by a long shot in terms of scale and scope is Europe. And Jean-Francois will be sharing more about that acceleration when he gets up here. But activity across all of these stakeholders is accelerating as consumer demand for more sustainable packaging continues to increase. The core at every package we design is really 3 things. Everything starts with what the consumer wants. But we are also obviously very focused on our direct customers and their needs in terms of driving their brand values, their operations and overall value proposition.
But we’re doing all of that while keeping the environment front and center. We strive for every new package that we introduced to have a smaller environmental impact than what came before. And that’s whether that’s our package or someone else’s package. I want to take a moment to explain how Graphic Packaging manages their innovation capability because we believe it’s part of our winning path here. We are very intentional with how we align our people, our structure and our process. And this is especially true since our acquisition of AR Packaging as we become more global. And while we have become a broader, more global footprint, we are still remaining centrally organized. At the same time, we clearly understand that within different geographical areas that there are unique consumer insights, regulatory environments and other insights that require us to maintain a really sharp focus in terms of those regional trends.
But to really drive our competitive advantage, we need to be globally connected and ensuring that as we unlock those — that knowledge and the insights that we get from one customer in one region that we’re sharing that to benefit all of our customers and regions across the globe. Today, we have 8 innovation hubs. We have 120 fully dedicated innovation employees, and we protect what we create with nearly 8,000 active patents. We leverage these investments along with the structure and process that we drive to keep accelerating our launches of new unique solutions that help support the customers and the markets that we’re in across this global network. Next, I want to take a couple of minutes to walk you through the innovation journey that we take hand in hand with our customers to develop these solutions.
Over the past 7 years, we’ve made significant investments in many key areas across this process in terms of people and capability, and we are delivering more value for our customers than we have in the past. Starting with market insights. We have made investments in our consumer insights capability, along with marketing. We’ve made talent acquisitions from CPG companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. And as a result, we’re seeing faster consumer insights while also developing stronger relationships with our direct customers and retailers to unlock their unique needs and goals. One of the areas that I was most excited about when I joined Graphic Packaging is in the first few months when it started to unveil to me how deep our talent and our capabilities are within R&D and the creative design group.
I can’t express how impressive and extensive these capabilities are. And more recently, obviously, going beyond that really competitive foundation that we have, we’ve been investing in things to help accelerate the front part of that funnel, things like rapid prototyping. So we can be in an ideation session with one of our customers at one of our 8 innovation hubs, and we can be ideating and creating new packaging concepts, and we can turn that into a tangible sample on that day, which is very powerful, and it really drives speed in our process. When I think about all the centers of excellence that we have across the company that comprise all the components of packaging, it’s very extensive. Everything from our paper science capabilities, our overall paper packaging capabilities, really strong breadth across material science.
And then you take our machine capabilities on top of it, and it really is unmatched. And what it allows us to do is to really drive innovation across our entire value chain that we operate in. And that’s really critical important when we think about the creative design process because one of the most important things that we do is when we design a new package, we are designing that with the end in mind. And what I mean by that is our teams are looking at that package, and they’re being able to adjust and understand how to develop that, so it can apply seamlessly into our manufacturing and our supply chain as well as to our customers, which is even more critical. This is what helps us drive cost efficiency and speed to our innovation funnel.
Also, we have some other fun new tools in terms of 3D visualization and also using augmented reality. And this helps us make designs come to live faster than ever before. We are leaders in the design and implementation of packaging machinery, which in some cases, is a critical component of our overall solution. This is something that we’ve developed for many years as leaders in the beverage market, but we’re finding new homes for this capability in the Food segment as well. But be very clear, our #1 goal when we design new packaging is to get it to work in the existing machine and equipment at our customers. That’s what really drives cost effectiveness and speed to the market. In the event that we have new innovative solutions that do require machines, our team is extremely capable to help them both in the testing and the piloting phase as well as a full global rollout when it’s ready.
They are very good at designing machine types that are flexible, which is important to accommodate different substrates as well as different sizes of substrates while also minimizing the footprint impact of that machinery for that precious manufacturing space at our customers. The final stage is commercialization, which is very complex, and this is where — this requires a very close working relationship with our customers to make that happen seamlessly. We have dedicated technical resources around the globe to help execute on these pilots as well as these experiments and these pilots. And at the same time, we have unmatched scale with over 100 manufacturing facilities with discrete printing and finishing capabilities that allow us to meet our customers wherever they are.
No one else can match the scale that we deliver. And our large global customers really value that about Graphic Packaging. At the same time, we provide a lot of benefit to the small- and medium-sized brands as they can benefit from the sophistication of our innovation capabilities. And we really value working with the small to medium brands as well because they are often early adopters of some of these innovations. All in all, this journey that we go on with our customers is anything but linear, but it’s — I hope that you can take away a lot of — obviously not able to talk about all the things that we’ve been doing, but I hope you take away and understand that we’ve made an incredible amount of investments and advancements. And again, having worked for lots of other companies, I cannot tell you how impressed I felt like I had the lottery when I started unveiling some of the key technical capabilities and you pair that with the tailwinds of sustainability, and it’s a really exciting place to be.
Our capabilities, our team and our collaborative process is really helping us drive to new and exciting winning solutions. So speaking of winning solutions. We have an unmatched portfolio of 5 global innovation platforms that are competitively advantaged and constitute an opportunity of $15 billion for paper packaging. Some of you may recall the unveiling, that Mike was just talking about, of our Vision 2025. At that time, we identified a $5 billion opportunity. So as part of these investments that we’ve accelerated as a company, we’ve been able to triple our addressable opportunity during that time. In addition, these platforms offer a value proposition over and above sustainability. There are discrete value propositions related to functionality and convenience for these products.
And equally important is they are leverageable across our geographies, across markets, product categories, and they are ready to be deployed at scale. In addition to packaging innovations, we’ve been busy innovating on paperboard with the launch of our most recent PaceSetter Rainier. Customers and consumers are asking for recycled content. As a result of our 2 transformational investments in recycling paperboard, this has enabled us to create a unique sheet that brings many of the advantages that bleached board has today. With this new sheet, it’s going to allow us to access underdeveloped markets here in the Americas, like oral and personal care, health care and beauty. The good news is as a result of our acquisition of AR Packaging, we have strong strategic relationships with the global brand owners that support these markets.
I’m very excited about PaceSetter Rainier. And while it’s still relatively new, we are getting very positive feedback from our customers and the market. And to be clear, we view this as an incremental opportunity, that’s over and above the $15 billion, that I just highlighted for the Consumer Packaging Innovation. Next, I’m going to take a drink of water. Next, I want to highlight how these 5 global innovation platforms and PaceSetter Rainier come to life, in the retail and foodservice channels that we operate in. Traditionally, our stronghold has been packaging in the center of the store in cookies and crackers and cereal and pasta. These transformational investments that we’ve made in recycled paperboard, has secured our long-term advantage in these categories.
The expansion of our diverse capabilities and portfolio, let us move with the consumer, as their spending habits shift between traditional grocery store, club stores, e-commerce, and quick service restaurants. The next slides I’m going to walk through each of the 5 platforms and give you an example of a couple of the innovations and help them become more real for you. Our products like paper seal and punnets are expanding Paperboard Packaging. We have a lot of Ps in this business, I’ve realized. Yes. Moving those to the perimeter, another P, outside of the center of the store, into areas like the deli, in the bakery, in the produce section and in products like fresh proteins and fresh pasta. At the same time, consumers are increasingly asking for more convenience, when they prepare their foods.
Our proprietary microwave and convection oven technology allow us to work with our top branded customers to provide products that not only give you that convenience but they do it without sacrificing quality for themselves, as well as their families. One of the most exciting developments in our platform here is the work that we’ve been doing to drive paperboard substitution for film, both in Retail as well as in our Foodservice. We expect this opportunity to continue to grow based on foam regulation expanding. And this portfolio is well positioned with unique solutions, that offer performance characteristics that either meet or exceed foam today. Many of you have seen our Chick-fil-A, Cold&Go Cups are some great examples out there for you to take a look at.
And this is an area where, obviously, it provides benefits in terms of insulation for beverage in the quick service market, and we’ll continue to drive penetration of that across those markets. At the same time, we’ve developed a unique microwave coating, that will allow our Cup portfolio to move into the Food section of the grocery store and other channels. We have a recent launch with Nissin Cup Noodles, that’s a microwavable product, which I’ll share a little bit more information about that in a bit. But this product is allowing us to move into those types of applications that support things like noodles and other ready-to-eat microwaveable meals. Our Boardio canister was originally developed by AR packaging. This gained early traction in Europe as brand owners were facing oncoming regulation.
Many of these same global brands are looking to utilize this canister in the Americas market as well. And this slide, as you can see here, is being used to replace other types of packaging materials, like plastic, metal and composite packaging. The original package was actually delivered — developed for infant formula, but it’s finding its ways in many new segments, just a handful here highlighted. As many of you know, we have a strong position in the beverage market today. However, our new innovative offerings allows solutions for customers, who are looking to replace their plastic rings and shrink film, across the globe. Our comprehensive portfolio of multipack products and machinery, it’s equipped to accommodate all the beverage formats that are in the market today.
We’ve since expanded these into newer markets outside of beverage into food, as you can see examples here. And we’re excited about that because we know as club store volume continues to grow, we’re seeing that the multipack configuration is gaining in popularity. You can see here examples of condiments and sauces, and it works well in other cylindrical food items. Club store, they are accelerating. And the good news is club stores themselves with their private brands have made some traction in adopting paperboard packaging to replace plastic and they’re encouraging their suppliers to do the same. Speaking of club stores and e-commerce, we’re seeing much greater demand for more durable packaging, as a result of their robust supply chains and heavy weighted products.
We have a proprietary strength packaging portfolio that ensures the right level of protection without the overuse of material, which is really key for cost optimization, as well as being more friendly to the environment. Highlighted here is the IntegraFlute. This is a package that replaces commonly used plastic bags, while also delivering a ship in own container configuration, which is really important for e-commerce. It provides a total omnichannel package for the brands that utilize this. Our unique package also provides an easy-to-open characteristic for consumers, where you can either pour or scoop the product directly — directly without having to transfer it to yet another container. This allows the branding on the package to remain in the home throughout its use.
I really — I love this example of a Graphic Packaging innovation because it helps solve the sustainability challenge on 2 different dimensions. But at the same time, it offers a benefit to the consumer, as well as the brand owner. Lastly, this is where PaceSetter Rainier will be making its debut, at a retailer near you. And it will be supporting the key markets that I just highlighted a short bit ago. To summarize, this is where we’ve been. And this is where we are. Through these innovation platforms, we have extended the ability for paperboard packaging, to reach new areas for consumers, in their quest to have a more sustainable future. And it takes a lot of work and a lot of collaboration with our customers to arrive at one of these coveted retail spots.
