Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-27
Source: The Conversation – France (in French)– By Benoît Heilbrunn, Professor of Marketing, ESCP Business School
The ongoing uncertainty surrounding the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz affects not only the price of energy. Plastics directly derived from oil are also concerned. With an unexpected effect: announced shortages, especially for packaging products. This raises a paradoxical question: what future for the content if the container no longer exists? A question that is both economic and philosophical.
We believe we live in a civilization of production, an idea that flatters our old metaphysical taste for depths. The essential would be inside: substance, matter, product; the rest would be just appearance, envelope, cosmetics. Yet, it is often the accessory that ultimately causes empires to stumble.
In the spring of 2026, at the height of the escalation between the United States and Iran, several alerts from Asia showed that an economy could be threatened not because it was out of products, but because it risked running out of naphtha, an indispensable input for petrochemicals and thus for some packaging plastics. In South Korea, there were concerns about tensions over medical bags, syringes, bags, and various packaging. This shows that the problem is not alwaysthe absence of content but the scarcity of the container.
The paradox of the container
What then becomes of milk without a carton or medicine without a blister pack (transparent plastic shell on a cardboard base, ed.)Â ? The substance remains, but it can no longer access its full commercial existence. It exists physically, but not yet socially or culturally.
The sequence we are going through harshly highlights the logic of global value chains. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reminds us that a large part of international trade takes place within global chains where raw materials, components, services, and intermediate products cross borders multiple times.
In such a system, the merchandise is the result of a layering of mediations. However, the packaging belongs precisely to thiscategory of mediations that is rarely seen, but whose absence paralyzes everything.
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Form before substance
To understand this paradox, one must deconstruct a too simple opposition between content, which would be essential, and container, which would be only a support. Classical philosophy invites us to think differently. Aristotelian hylomorphism conceives concrete beings as composites of matter and form: matter does not truly exist as a fully determined thing without the form that actualizes it.
Transposed to the commercial world, this old lesson reminds us that a product does not exist as a simple economic material; it only exists insofar as it is already embedded in a form that makes it visible, manageable, storable, differentiable, and transportable.
The packaging does not dress the product afterwards. It gives it a mode of existence. It transforms it from a state of substance into a desirable and marketable object.
Six hundred million euros in annual investments
Moreover, in many universes, thepackagingsometimes concentrates more economic and symbolic value than the content itself. Depending on the categories, packaging can represent up to 30 to 40% of the product cost. For beverages, theNational Association of Food Industries (ANIA)emphasizes that it can represent up to 50% of the carbon footprint over the entire life cycle.
As for the glass packaging, its European federation recalls that it currently drives more than 150 decarbonization projects and over 600 million euros in annual investments. The container is therefore not just an aesthetic addition nor a potential waste: it represents a major economic item, sometimes the most sensitive part of the total cost. Where the content has low immediate material value – water, juice, diluted products, highly standardized goods – the pack can become thedecisive part of the final market value.
Packaging as a symbolic frontier
But the scope of packaging is not limited to cost savings. It is also anthropological.
The anthropologist Mary Douglas showed inOf the defilement(1967) that societies organize the world through symbolic boundaries, between the pure and the impure, the clean and the dirty, what is in its place and what is not. Contemporary packaging can be read as a small device of this symbolic policing. It physically separates the inside from the outside but symbolically integrates the clean with the soiled. The sealed blister, the intact lid, the transparent bottle, the sterile pouch, or the untampered box are techniques, certainly, but also acts of material purification.
Packaging does not just preserve; it guarantees that the contents are still intact, that they have not been corrupted, touched, or altered. It reenacts on a small scale a major anthropological operation: setting something apart to make it acceptable.
That is why it is mistaken to say that packaging is just a medium. We almost never consume a bare substance but rather a staging. We consume a substance already elevated to the status of a sign. And it is here that we must recall Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous formula according to which foods “good to eat” are primarily “good to think.”
The whiteness of a yogurt pack evokes health, the transparency of a bottle suggests truth, the texture of packaging already makes one believe in the quality of its contents. Marketing therefore does not only sell objective properties; it organizes a perceptive dramaturgy where every material detail becomes the support of a belief. The product seduces first through its packaging. And moreover, in many sectors, one consumes the package more than the substance.
The container as a culture operator
The idea of a fear of naphtha shortage would probably have delighted Lévi-Strauss because it involves a structural inversion between the principal and the secondary. Structuralism consists, let us recall, in looking at the relationships between terms and not their immediate evidence.InMythological, and in particular in volume 1,The Raw and the Cooked(1964), we see how seemingly simple oppositions — raw and cooked, nature and culture, inside and outside — become complicated as soon as they are placed back into a system.
Here is played an opposition of the same kind:content and container. Spontaneously, we attribute value to the content and relegate the container to the status of an outer envelope. Yet the crisis reverses this hierarchy: it is the container that becomes decisive, it is the one that commands the social existence of the content. The supposedly peripheral term becomes central; the supposedly accessory becomes the condition of the necessary. Packaging then appears as a kind of semiotic cooking: it transforms a substance from the world into the state of merchandise.
However, as anthropologist Philippe Descola reminds us, the separation between nature and culture is not a universal given but aassembly specific to Western naturalism. Packaging can then be understood as one of the ordinary operators in the culturalization of nature. Water, a transformed fruit, milk, juice, or cream do not circulate as mere fragments of the world. They must be named, protected, coded, and shaped. Packaging precisely accomplishes this operation. It does not destroy nature; it translates it into an order of visibility, norms, signs, and circulation. It brings a substance into a regime of culture. In this sense, the pack is the discreet emblem of a modernity that does not merely exploit nature but reformats it.
From the bottle to the container
This logic can moreover be extended to the ultimate overpackaging represented by the standardized maritime container. InThe Box, Marc Levinson(2006) shows how this simple steel box transformed economic geography, disrupted ports, reduced handling costs, and made a much smoother globalization of goods possible.
New proof that civilizations are transformed not only by the ideas they proclaim, but by the formats they standardize. From the bottle to the container, the same logic: to hold, to circulate, to arrive. Small box, large box, always the same power of the container.
Benoît Heilbrunn does not work for, does not advise, does not own shares in, does not receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no affiliation other than his research institution.
–ref. The powerless abundance: when packaging takes its revenge –https://theconversation.com/the-powerless-abundance-when-packaging-takes-its-revenge-280938