Innovative packaging solutions for sustainability across the supply chain: key themes and trade-offs in global firm experience. A text mining analysis.

Sustainable packaging has become a strategic priority for firms facing increasing regulatory pressure and growing consumer demand for environmentally responsible solutions. However, existing research has provided limited large-scale empirical evidence on how firms frame packaging innovation for sustainability and how sustainability is embedded within corporate innovation narratives. This study addresses this gap by analysing a global corpus of packaging innovation projects submitted to the WorldStar Packaging Awards between 2023 and 2025. Using text-mining techniques combining Structural Topic Modeling and dictionary-based analysis, the study identifies the dominant thematic domains of packaging innovation and examines how sustainability is embedded across different strategic orientations. The results show that sustainability is more strongly embedded in logistics-oriented packaging innovations, while marketing-oriented projects place comparatively less emphasis on sustainability.