On Wednesday, November 19, 2025, Western Growers’ Jeana Cadby and Isa Glassen joined Taylor Farms’ Wyatt Maysey and Ag Innovations’ Robert Gould for a breakout session on “Sustainable Packaging for Fresh Produce: Industry Alliance and Roadmap” at the Sustainable Agriculture Summit in Anaheim. The Summit is a leading annual gathering for farmers, suppliers, processors, brands, academia and conservation and public sector organizations working to build a more resilient and sustainable U.S. food system. Its focus on knowledge-sharing, emerging challenges and collaborative solutions make it an ideal venue to highlight the industry’s progress on sustainable packaging.

During the session, we dug into the core challenges driving packaging decisions in fresh produce: food loss and waste, food safety and regulatory pressures, changing retailer expectations, the need for packaging functionality, supply chain realities and the environmental impacts tied to upstream materials and end-of-life options. We introduced the Sustainable Produce Packaging Alignment (SPPA) initiative and its roadmap for aligning functionality requirements with sustainability outcomes.

Using live Slido polling, we engaged attendees on packaging trends, tradeoff management and the considerations they believe matter most, from recyclability and compostability to performance, availability and cost. This interactive format helped highlight where supply chain partners are aligned and where additional work is needed to support industry-wide improvements.

Functional sustainability is a central theme of the discussion. Packaging must simultaneously protect produce, uphold food safety and prevent food waste while also reducing material impacts, so it’s important that we understand and work toward balancing these tradeoffs. Across the room, growers, shippers, retailers and packaging suppliers expressed a strong desire for alignment through clear, practical guidance rooted in technical performance and real-world feasibility.

Collaboration is a key component in advancing these efforts. Bringing diverse supply-chain voices together helps bridge expectations, highlight shared priorities and welcome new partners into the SPPA effort. We believe road mapping is a valuable, structured approach that can provide a common path for responsible decision-making across the industry. Presentations like this illustrate why cross-sector alignment is essential and reinforce how SPPA is uniquely positioned to advance scientifically sound, achievable and sustainable packaging guidelines for the fresh produce industry.