Fewer than a third of brand packaging targets due by 2025 were reported met

How SPI scored the 2025 targets

The SPI Buyers Database holds 179 public packaging targets set by 42 brand owners and retailers. Each target carries the company’s wording, its deadline, the latest progress figure the company has published and a link to that source. This scorecard takes every target whose deadline is 2025 or earlier, which is the counting rule agreed with SPI’s build team: “targets with a 2025 deadline” in the live database. In the 13 October snapshot, 26 companies hold at least one such target.

SPI uses five statuses, set out in Exhibit 2. The scorecard depends on reading them carefully.

“Not reported” is the status that most needs care. It means a result has not been published in a form SPI can match to the target. It does not mean the company failed: some companies publish annual results late in the following year, some report a figure without saying whether it meets the goal, and some have replaced the goal.

Two held changes are being applied in the SPI team’s 13 October 2026 check. A further batch of company profiles adds four targets due by 2025, all not yet reported, for ALDI UK, Hindustan Unilever and The Kraft Heinz Company, and Reckitt’s recycled-content target moves from behind to not reported. The counts written as live figures in this article update themselves when that import lands; counts SPI derived by hand are labelled as from the 13 October snapshot.

Five outcomes, not three: the SPI 2025 outcome archetypes

A status label answers one question: did the company say it hit the number? A buyer, supplier or investor needs two more: how far off was it, and is a figure available at all? SPI therefore sorts every 2025 target into five archetypes, built only from the statuses and figures in the database. Exhibit 3 is the organising device for the rest of this piece.

The archetypes change the reading of the headline. Cleared plus near miss is 25 of 56 targets, about 45%, where the company landed at or within 5 points of what it promised. Wide misses and the silent groups make up the rest, and that is where the remaining packaging redesign work, and the supplier opportunity, sits.

The scorecard by target type

Exhibit 1 splits the 2025 targets by what they measure. The pattern is stark, and Exhibit 4 regroups it by how much of the result the company controls.

Recyclability goals were the hardest. Sixteen targets promised that packaging, or plastic packaging, would be recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025, most of them at 100%. One is reported met: Haleon’s goal “to develop solutions for all product packaging to be recycle-ready”, which Haleon says it met, with 80% of packaging recycle-ready in the period to 30 June 2025, and says it will revisit its recyclable packaging goal in 2026 (Haleon Health, Inclusivity and Sustainability Report 2025). Eight are reported missed and seven have no reported result.

Virgin plastic reduction split evenly. Of eleven goals, four are reported met, three missed and four not reported. Kenvue reports a 33% cut against a 2020 base year for a 25% goal, and Mondelēz International 11.5% against 2020 for a 5% goal.

Recycled content was close to the line. Of fourteen goals, four are reported met, five missed, four not reported and one behind.

Reuse, lighter packaging and absolute plastic goals were all met. Carrefour reports 2,459 reusable packaging solutions and 2,360 stores with a collection system for a pledge of 1,000 solutions and 500 stores, and 22,873 tonnes of packaging removed since 2017 against 20,000 tonnes; in both cases the met status is SPI’s reading of the reported figures, as noted on the profile (Carrefour 2025 Universal Registration Document, 27 March 2026). Target met its aim to explore at least five reuse programmes “a year early” (Target 2026 Sustainability and Governance Report). The Lidl and Kaufland divisions report 36% less plastic in own-brand primary packaging and transport aids against 2017, beyond their 30% goal (Schwarz Group, 27 May 2026).

The company scorecard

Exhibit 5 lists every company with a target due by 2025, sorted by the share reported met. It shows counts only; the profile for each company gives the wording and source line by line.

Three points of context keep the table fair. First, a company with more targets has more chances to miss. Second, not every target is a packaging measure in the narrow sense: Pfizer’s 2025 target asks suppliers covering 64% of spend to set science-based greenhouse gas targets, and Pfizer reports 72% (Pfizer 2025 Impact Report, 2 June 2026); SPI keeps it because the counting rule takes every 2025 target. Third, scopes differ: the Lidl figures cover the Lidl and Kaufland divisions together, Tesco’s 99% covers UK Own Brand packaging, and Unilever’s and Colgate-Palmolive’s are group-wide. The table does not rank them.

How close were the misses?

A binary status throws away the distance between promise and result. Exhibit 6 puts both on one axis for every 2025 target with a company-reported result in comparable units.

SPI measured the shortfall for each of the 18 reported misses that have a figure (Tesco’s paper target has none) as goal minus reported result, in percentage points. The median shortfall is 5.5 points. The mean is 9.8 points, pulled up by four wide gaps: Walmart recyclability (35.7 points), Carrefour recyclability (32.8), Walmart virgin plastic (19.1) and Reckitt recyclability (19, on its 2024 figure). Exhibit 7 groups the misses by distance.

Ambition and outcome

Set the met and missed goals side by side and a pattern appears in the level of ambition.

On virgin plastic, the two smallest goals were beaten by the widest margin: Mondelēz International and Ahold Delhaize both set 5% and both more than doubled it. The two one-third goals, at Nestlé and Colgate-Palmolive, both fell short, by 5 and 1 points. Kenvue’s 25% goal, beaten with 33%, sits in between.

On recycled content, three company-wide plastic goals were reported met, and all three cleared a 25% goal by 2 points or less: Unilever at exactly 25%, Lidl at 26% and Colgate-Palmolive at 27%. Unilever describes the result as “achieving our goal of 25% PCR by 2025” (Unilever Annual Report and Accounts 2025, 12 March 2026). Diageo’s goal was narrower, recycled content in PET bottles, and it beat 35% with 43% in fiscal 2025 and 44% in fiscal 2026 (Diageo ESG Reporting Index 2026).

On recyclability, ambition was uniform: almost every goal was 100%, and almost every result fell short. Unilever’s figures for its later recyclability goal show where the last points sit: 57% of its plastic packaging was reusable, recyclable or compostable in 2025, made up of 75% of rigids and 15% of flexibles (Unilever Annual Report and Accounts 2025). The flexible packaging article follows that thread.

What "not reported" covers

The 24 targets with no reported result are not a single group. SPI read each one and sorted them by what the company has published (Exhibit 8).

The first group is the most useful, because a reader can compare the figure with the goal even though the company has not. The second group may be waiting for the next annual report: the Kraft Heinz reports page still listed its 2025 ESG Report, covering 2024, as the latest when SPI checked on 14 October 2026. The third group has no usable figure: Kenvue’s paper and wood fibre goal is not reported in its 2025 Healthy Lives Mission Report, and Target gave year-on-year virgin plastic figures in its FY2024 report without defining them against the 2020 baseline.

Fairness cuts both ways. Keurig Dr Pepper reports 21% less virgin plastic than 2019 in 2025, above its 20% goal level, but does not declare the goal met, so SPI does not either. Mars reports 9.2% recycled resin and 5.9% less virgin plastic in its 2025 report but does not state the result against its 30% and 25% goals. The Kraft Heinz measure slipped from 87% in 2022 and 2023 to 86% in 2024, and its 2025 ESG Report counts materials labelled “check locally” as recyclable, a broad definition (Kraft Heinz 2025 ESG Report, as given in the SPI Buyers Database).

Hindustan Unilever shows why a collection goal and a reduction goal can point in opposite directions. Its plastics page reports a cumulative EPR collection quantity of about 837,000 tonnes by 2025, up from about 656,000 tonnes a year earlier, consistent with its claim to collect more plastic than it uses (Hindustan Unilever Plastics page, as given in the SPI Buyers Database). SPI calculation: the same page puts the total plastic footprint at about 96,000 tonnes in 2019 and about 128,000 tonnes in 2025, a rise of about 33%. The collection figure has risen on the company’s own numbers while the footprint it offsets has grown too.

Retailers, brand owners and food service

In the 13 October snapshot, six retailers hold 20 of the 2025 targets. Exhibit 10 shows their profile is close to the brand owners’: 6 met, 8 missed and 6 not reported, against 10, 11 and 10. Walmart alone accounts for four of the retailer misses. Retailers set goals for own-brand packaging, which they specify but do not usually make, so their results depend on many suppliers at once. McDonald’s, the only food service company with 2025 goals, has published results to the end of 2024, including 90.93% of the way to its goal of sourcing primary guest packaging from renewable, recycled or certified materials (McDonald’s Goal Performance and Reporting page).

Goals that changed before and after the deadline

Several 2025 goals were reworded, replaced, retired or paused. Exhibit 11 records the changes as the companies describe them, including those published since the deadline passed.

How the 2025 tally could settle

The 24 silent targets will not stay silent forever. SPI built three scenarios for the final tally from the figures companies have already published (Exhibit 12).

SPI calculation: met share = met targets divided by targets due by 2025. Low: 16 / 56 = 28.6%. Base: (16 + 2) / 56 = 32.1%. High: (16 + 4) / 56 = 35.7%. With the four held targets added and treated as not met, the shares are 16 / 60 = 26.7%, 18 / 60 = 30.0% and 20 / 60 = 33.3%. The inputs are company-reported figures; SPI does not decide whether any goal was met.

The scenarios bound the answer tightly. Even the high case needs two companies to declare goals met that they have not declared, and two more to have closed 4 and 9 points since their latest figure. No plausible reading of the published data takes the met share to half.

What comes after 2025

Exhibit 13 shows 54 targets due in 2030 in the snapshot, against 56 due by 2025. They fall due in the same year that several legal packaging obligations start in the EU and in US states. The 2026 to 2030 deadlines calendar sets out those dates, including the PPWR recyclability rule (PR-EU-010) and recycled-content minimums (PR-EU-004) from 1 January 2030, and California’s 50% postconsumer content for plastic beverage containers carrying the California Redemption Value (PR-US-009).