To Junie Demange, there is beauty in minimalism, especially around packaging. Getting items to customers is mandatory. By delivering them with the least amount of packaging, it’s a benefit to both customers and P&G.

As the senior director for E-commerce supply chain Europe and lead for P&G’s “Fit to win product and packaging” program, Demange works on streamlining the design and delivery of cost-effective packaging. The results? Indisputable. By eliminating what she calls “overboxing,” or putting one package into another, P&G used 5 million fewer boxes in the past year.

“Fit to win is such a beautiful concept,” she says. “It’s a win for P&G with category growth. It’s a win for the retailer on operational costs. It’s a win for the shopper on more delight, and it’s a win for the planet via more sustainable products and packaging.”

You can hear more from Demange in the video below or read our lightly edited transcript.

TRANSCRIPT

I started at P&G, 21 years ago, and I discovered the function of supply network operations. A supply chain is all about making products available to shoppers and consumers, and doing that in the most efficient way, from cost inventory and also sustainability. “Fit to win” is a model which looks at defining what is the best portfolio, and it looks at how do we define the best possible assortment that will deliver category growth for P&G, but also a benefit for the retailer, because it reduces its cost, a benefit for the shopper, obviously with more convenience or superior products, but also a benefit for the planet.

Part of the “Fit to win” mission is to grow within the company and potentially become the lighthouse of how we define product and portfolio in the future. The three things that I try and ask my supply chain organization to work on is, number one, product quality. The second thing is, how do we deliver more convenience and less handling for retailers. For instance, P&G providing a box that can travel its way to the consumer’s home directly without the need to overbox it.

In the last year, we’ve been able to avoid five million boxes. So this is five million cartons that haven’t been needed altogether. That’s a big sustainability impact. The last thing is the sustainability impact itself. How can we think of a way that we can reduce the need for packaging altogether, and that we can eliminate waste. Shoppers today don’t want to be throwing away a lot of packaging material every time they order online, so our role and our opportunity as well is really to try and reduce the amount of packaging altogether so they throw away a lot less in the future.

In 2023 our relationship with Amazon on packaging has enabled us to really increase the amount of products that ship in their own packaging directly to the consumer’s home. Just in that year, 58% of the baskets that contain one item ended up shipping without an Amazon box around them. That’s a lot of carton that we’ve been able to save together. There’s a load of opportunities that we can go after to further build the brand, build the loyalty and have a direct relationship with our consumers by leveraging the right products and packaging in P&G.

We have a tradition of doing store checks. We go in store and we check the shelf and we see how it looks. I don’t think we have that tradition up and running as much when it comes to online store checks. We can visit websites, but do we really often order our own products from the websites, receive them somewhere in a facility, open them and see what’s wrong? “Fit to win” is all about that. It’s not market science, if you think about it, but it’s really about identifying what the opportunities and potentially the defects are in doing something about it.

In the past four years, “Fit to win” has really spread from a PowerPoint model to a team of people who want to make things right and make some changes and also recognize that we’re not only doing it because it’s a business opportunity, but because it’s what the shopper really needs, which is very much linked to the business opportunity, but it’s the right thing to do from a sustainability benefit. So “Fit to win” is such a beautiful concept. It’s a win for P&G with category growth. It’s a win for the retailer on operational cost. It’s a win for the shopper on more delight, and it’s a win for the planet via more sustainable products and packaging. It’s a win, win, win, win model.