Unlocking value through sustainability, efficiency, and design differentiation
By Jordi Oliver-Solà, Sofía Garín Martínez, Adriana Sanz Mirabal
January 21, 2025
5 MIN READ
This article is featured in the Magazine “Private Label and National Brands: Decoding Food Retail”, created in collaboration with Global Retail Brands. You can find more insights about the Magazine and additional articles here.
Ecodesign is no longer a niche practice, it is becoming a strategic necessity for businesses operating in the food retail sector. As environmental concerns grow along the value chain, including among consumers, and as legislation tightens, companies are expected to reduce their impact without compromising product performance or competitiveness.
Ecodesign offers a practical method for addressing these expectations, enabling brands to improve the environmental performance of their products across the entire life cycle. From the extraction of raw materials to manufacturing, packaging, distribution, use, and end-of-life, ecodesign provides a clear framework for embedding sustainability into product development.
According to research by the European Commission Product Bureau, it is estimated that 80% of all product-related environmental impacts can be influenced during the design phase. In this context, ecodesign encourages doing more with less: using fewer materials, reducing energy consumption, simplifying logistics, and designing products and packaging with recyclability or reuse in mind.
These strategies often lead not only to environmental benefits, but also to financial gains, what is called eco-efficiency. This double impact is particularly appealing in the context of today’s competitive retail landscape.
Private vs Branded: Different Motivations, Shared Opportunities
Both private label and branded products can benefit from ecodesign, though their motivations may differ. For private labels, which are typically managed by retailers with cost control, ecodesign is often used as a tool a strong focus on operational efficiency and for reducing material and transport costs, improving production efficiency, and ensuring compliance with environmental regulations.
The incentive is clear: more efficient products mean lower costs and smoother supply chains. Lidl, for instance, as part of the Schwarz Group’s REset Plastic strategy, has achieved a 28% reduction in plastic usage for its private label packaging across 32 countries, compared to a 2017 baseline.
Branded products, meanwhile, tend to approach ecodesign from a different angle. These companies are more likely to view sustainability as a way to differentiate their products, enhance perceived value, and connect with environmentally conscious consumers.
For them, ecodesign is part of a broader strategy to communicate innovation, responsibility, and quality. It supports the creation of a brand narrative that aligns with consumer expectations and helps secure a competitive edge.
The aim of communicating the benefits and difference with other brands is one of the main motivations to use quantitative data and measure environmental impact. Measuring can be part of the ecodesign methodology, not only to disclose final results but rather to help designers to take conscious decisions. Despite these differences, both types of products ultimately converge on the same outcome: smarter design that benefits both businesses and the environment.
Ecodesign allows companies to respond proactively to sustainability challenges, rather than reactively adjusting to external pressures. By anticipating the environmental implications of design choices early in the development process, companies can avoid costly redesigns, strengthen customer loyalty, and increase the resilience of their brands.
Beyond Quick Wins: Unlocking the Next Phase of Circular Design
As the transition to a circular economy gains momentum, ecodesign plays a central role.It is not simply about reducing impact, but about rethinking products in a way that supports long-term value creation, rethinking the way we create and the way we consume.
The circular economy promotes a shift from the traditional “take-make-dispose” model to one that keeps resources in use for as long as possible, extracting their maximum value before recovering them at the end of their service life. In this context, ecodesign acts as a practical method to enable circular principles to take root, whether through the development of packaging that is easier to collect and recycle, the design of product components that can be disassembled and repaired, or the choice of materials that are biodegradable or derived from renewable sources.
At the early stages of circular transition, it is natural, and often necessary, for brands to focus on gains in efficiency. Reducing the weight of single-use plastic packaging, incorporating recycled materials, or lowering energy consumption are all meaningful improvements. However, these efficiency gains tend to have limited potential as many companies have already implemented it.
Once the single-use system has been optimised, further progress becomes increasingly difficult within that framework. That is when the conversation must evolve. To move forward, companies will need to shift their focus from isolated product or packaging improvements to the wider system in which their operations and supply chains function. It’s no longer just about products, it’s about embracing the full product-service-system. The next frontier in circular design lies in enabling reuse, repair, remanufacture, and other strategies that extend the lifespan of products and materials already in the economy.
Unilever, for example, is exploring ways to shift product business models and eliminate unnecessary packaging. Reuse and refill systems are a key focus, with more than 50 pilot initiatives already launched worldwide and plans to scale up to 1,500 in Indonesia by 2025. In other words, the challenge will no longer be to “make it less bad,” but to redesign business models and logistics systems in a way that regenerates value.
For instance, it is clearly more sustainable to refill and reuse a bottle twenty times than to use twenty single-use bottles, even if those disposable bottles are lighter or contain a percentage of recycled plastic. This kind of systemic innovation goes beyond product tweaks, it requires collaboration, new infrastructures, and often new consumer behaviours. Retailers are beginning to explore this shift. Loop, a circular shopping platform developed by TerraCycle, has partnered with global brands like Procter & Gamble and retailers such as Tesco and Carrefour to pilot reusable packaging for everyday products.
In these models, consumers return used containers to be cleaned, refilled, and sold again, creating a closed-loop system.
Coordinated Action and the Role of Private Labels
The path ahead calls for joint innovation across the entire retail value chain. From suppliers and manufacturers to distributors and retailers, no single actor can drive this transformation alone. Each step forward, whether it’s creating reverse logistics for refillable containers or designing standardised components that simplify repair, depends on coordinated action and a shared vision.
In this context, private labels may have a unique advantage. Given their vertical integration and control over product development, packaging, and distribution, they may be well positioned to experiment with circular systems that connect different stages of the value chain under a single management structure.
Whether this advantage will translate into leadership in circular innovation remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the opportunity is wide open. The next generation of ecodesign will not only shape how products are made, but also how they are used, reused, and reintroduced into the economy. And those who embrace this complexity with creativity and determination will be at the forefront of the retail industry’s sustainable future.
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