J&J sets up center for packaging innovation in Brazil
Valor Econômico
Johnson & Johnson has created a personnel structure aimed at the area of packaging design and São José dos Campos will be one of the four innovation centers in the world for such sector. The other centers are located in France, aimed at the European market, in Shanghai, aimed at Asia, and another one in the United States. Until 2005, each region had an agency for the development of design and the packaging area was subordinated to the consumer products division.
With the changes, J&J starts centralizing the creations at a specific agency, headquartered in New York, which has become a major repository of all products developed by the company in the world. The local agencies were aimed at the more regionalized brands like Sundown sunscreen, in Brazil, which carries a very strong cultural component. J&J in Brazil has launched nearly 230 products a year for Latin America. The work is done by 12 people hired in the last four years. The team is divided into units for products for babies, beauty, no prescription drugs and personal care.
Engineer Renato Wakimoto, Strategy Director of Design and Packaging of the Consumption Division of J&J, who previously worked for Natura, brought with him a vast experience in the area of sustainability, a topic that has also become directly involved in the production process of the packaging of J&J. The company has created nine guidelines to assure its packages are produced with the smallest environmental impact possible and one of the reasons is the fact that packaging has become one of the main environmental villains.
J&J will be the first Brazilian cosmetics industry to use green polyethylene, developed from sugarcane by Braskem, in the packages of sunscreens of the Sundown brand, as of 2010. The company assesses the use of the green polyethylene in other product lines and in other regions of the world. The new guidelines include getting rid of polemical raw materials such as PVC.
Besides the environmental issue, J&J is concerned with the social impact produced by the packaging that carry its products. International consulting company Delta has been hired to focus on socio-environmental works. According to Akimoto, this company is selecting a group of five to nine cooperatives formed by collectors of recyclable material in Brazil that will be certified and will provide the collected material to J&J's suppliers of raw material. The project has partners such as Wal-Mart, Suzano Papel e Celulose, the Municipal Government of São José dos Campos and Ancor, J&J's supplier of the plastic bottles.