(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor) – Tetra Pak’s 2026 launchs under the banner of continuity. Innovation and sustainability are the two guidelines along which the Group, active in food packaging and processing solutions and present in over 160 countries with more than 24,000 employees, wants to continue to write its own history in the world and in Italy, where it has been present for 60 years. And despite 2025 being “quite a complicated year, especially due to the difficulties cautilized by the drop in consumption”, in an interview with Radiocor Paolo Maggi, managing director and president Tetra Pak South Europe, confesses that the expectation is of “results in line with the previous year“, when the group recorded a global turnover of 12.8 billion euro, “with the hope of growing in the process and service areas”.
The pet food market opportunity in Italy
Narrowing the focus to Italy, it is interesting to see how the demographic decline affecting our peninsula in recent years has prompted the group to enter new market segments. “Like our customers, we are quite exposed to the dynamics of consumption, across product categories. For example, in 2025 we reacted a lot to the demographic decline: at the finish of the year we arrived with about 320,000 fewer births than in 2024, so it is clear that many of our partners are viewing for growth in alternative categories and pet food is one of them,” Maggi explains. The launch ofTetra Recart, a paper-based container designed to package solid food, has therefore allowed the group “to enter some categories in which we were not present before: from tomatoes to fruit, from meat to fish, and even pet food,” the top manager emphasises. “Faced with a drop in births there is a very interesting increase in pets, I believe there are about 25.5 million in Italy, so it is clear that having a packaging solution that offers sustainability and innovation, as well as being extremely competitive for transport, logistics and storage, opens very important doors,” Maggi continues.
Global investment confirmed at 140 million in R&S
However, innovation and sustainability remain at the heart of the growth project: “they have always been part of our DNA and the company has invested b>between 400 and 500 million euros in research and development globally in recent years,” continues Maggi, who specifies that annually, again on a global level, “100 million is allocated to sustainable innovation and 40 million to development activities in the area of materials collection, sorting and recycling. Figures also confirmed for the current year’. Both of these lines are very important in Italy: ‘from the point of view of sustainability, our counattempt is a virtuous example at European level, becautilize we have developed a very high collection and recycling capacity for our materials, thanks to collaborations with our partners such as Comieco or Lucart’. The goal is to ‘reach a collection rate of more than 55% of the materials invested in the market, while for innovation the ambition is to arrive by 2030 with containers that are as sustainable as possible, with a percentage of paper inside around 90%,’ explains the top manager. And 2026 will see the introduction in the Italian market of a container ‘in which the aluminium layer has been replaced with a paper-based barrier, which will bring the content of this material over 80%’, allowing the company to approach the 90% tarreceive.
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