“What is the right strategy for sensible packaging? The case of FNAC Darty was the central question at the second conference of the ALL4PACK EMBALLAGE PARIS conference, held on Wednesday 20 September as part of Paris Retail Week.

Rethinking packaging: Fnac Darty case study

Are the days of irrational packaging over? Gregory Chekroun, Director of Logistics, Transport and Flows at FNAC Darty and keynote speaker at the second conference of the ALL4PACK EMBALLAGE PARIS conference, certainly seems to think so.

“We’ve set ourselves the target of reducing our CO2 emissions by 50%, which means we have to change our practices considerably, particularly when it comes to packaging. We’ve stopped over-packaging, we prefer paper to cardboard and we’re trying more and more to move towards reusable packaging” reports Gregory Chekroun, for whom this new Group policy is “not only more sustainable but also more profitable”. However, it does have its limits: “We’re making very rapid progress in the B-to-B sector, but it’s more difficult in the B-to-C sector. This is true for transport, but also for packaging, especially at a time when returns are tending to increase”, acknowledged FNAC Darty’s Director of Logistics, Transport and Flow, for whom it remains “very difficult to get rid of all unnecessary packaging, even if it has been banned from the Group’s purchasing charter”.

For Fabrice Peltier, who also attended the conference as an expert consultant in packaging eco-design, the challenge now is “to do for B-to-C what we’ve already managed to do for B-to-B, and to put an end to zero-function packaging”. The problem is that, for a long time, we thought packaging didn’t cost anything. We need to restore value to packaging, and both consumers and retailers need to be aware of this value”.

Grégory Chekroun also identified employee training as another lever for transformation. “It has already enabled us to significantly reduce the rate of waste, especially as everyone is committed to the project,” he said.

But there is still a long way to go. And that requires both adaptability and method: “the idea is to identify where we are improving, but also to identify where we can do even better”, concluded Grégory Chekroun.

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