All You Can Imagine about E-Packaging in Next Decades

Are you strange with e-packaging? It stands for packaging with smart electronic devices which often involves the printing of conductive circuits right on the packaging substrate—include increasing sales by better merchandising, improving the human interface by spoken or scrolling instructions, and providing valuable electronic rewards on or in the package. [1] This nascent technology may change transform the packaging ways in the world.

E-packaging has many advantages to customer and supply chain management. For instance, in the healthcare medicine field, using e-packaging to record which drug pill was removed from the packets in order to monitor patients’ compliance. It can also increase attractive of products, such as talking pizza boxes, winking logos on multipacks of biscuits and bottles of rum, compliance-monitoring blister packs in drug trials, plastic bottles of drugs that prompt the user, testers on batteries, and reprogrammable decoration on mobile phones.[1] Other using as  anti-theft retail package product are also appealing.

However due to reasons like high cost and immature technology, E-packaging is not widely used now, as data shown in the following graph, seldom companies are using this technology currently. However the future E-packaging using is predicted to sharply increase in next decades. 

Seems that in next decades, the brands or packages of products will look like all kinds of high-tech you can imagine. I am wondering how these fancy packages will change the supply chain management in future.

Interactive bottle labels from Innovia and PragmatiC Printing

RF sensor and tag for monitoring and reporting food freshness.  
References:

[1]http://www.packworld.com/e-packaging-grow-%E2%80%A8rapidly-next-decade