Rethinking Packaging: Materials, Risk, and Real-World Performance in Pharma Logistics

As pharmaceutical supply chains continue to expand and operate under tighter timelines, the cold chain is becoming more complex, more distributed, and more exposed to variability than ever before. Temperature-sensitive medicines, including biologics, specialty pharmaceuticals, and advanced therapies, require precise control as they move through fragmented logistics networks and unpredictable real-world conditions. Industry analyses estimate that the global pharmaceutical temperature-controlled packaging market is expected to reach $18.1 billion by 2030, reflecting rising biologics adoption and increasing demand for qualified distribution systems that can maintain product integrity across extended global lanes.¹ At the same time, the global cell and gene therapy cold chain logistics market is projected to grow from about $2.02 billion in 2025 to $4.47 billion by 2031, driven by the expansion of personalized therapies that require strict temperature-controlled transport and specialized distribution infrastructure.²

At LogiPharma Europe, Richard Harrop, product director at Topa Thermal, explored these challenges in his session, “Supporting Safe Distribution: Can evolving material choices keep your most valuable products within a safe temperature range—without costing the Earth?” His discussion focused on how cold chain packaging is evolving in response to shifting distribution realities, regulatory expectations, and the increasing need for more adaptive, risk-informed design approaches.

In his interview with Pharmaceutical Commerce, Harrop expands on how insulation technologies and packaging strategies are still anchored in established material systems, such as EPS, polyurethane, and vacuum insulation, but are being continuously reassessed against real-world performance demands. Rather than viewing innovation as a purely material-driven exercise, he emphasizes the importance of aligning packaging design with actual distribution risks, recognizing that variability in transit conditions, delays, and handling environments often defines performance outcomes more than laboratory conditions alone.

Harrop also addresses the broader shift in how the industry approaches risk and validation. Instead of attempting to design for every hypothetical failure scenario, he advocates for structured risk assessment grounded in practical logistics realities, supported by clear communication between shippers and packaging providers. As supply chains become more global and therapies more complex, he suggests that success depends less on overengineering and more on selecting fit-for-purpose solutions that reflect the true operating environment.

Finally, Harrop highlights how the increasing complexity of therapies such as cell and gene treatments is reshaping expectations for cold chain infrastructure. As distribution moves closer to the patient and involves a wider range of stakeholders, packaging systems must adapt to new usage environments, education requirements, and service models. In this context, resilience is defined not just by thermal performance, but by the ability of systems and partners to anticipate risk, respond to disruption, and maintain product integrity across an increasingly dynamic global network.

Watch both parts of Harrop’s interview with PC:

1. LogiPharma Europe: Richard Harrop on Packaging Innovation
2. LogiPharma Europe: Why Packaging Must Evolve For Patients

Editor's note: This transcript is a lightly edited rendering of the original audio/video content. It may contain errors, informal language, or omissions as spoken in the original recording.

PC: In your presentation you mention evolving material choices, with sustainability in mind, can you elaborate on this? Where is the industry heading in this regard?

Harrop: The truth of the matter is, is that there's a number of materials that really dominate the industry from an ability to insulate. We're all used to polystyrene or EPS or some variant of that, and that's your entry level material. That's giving us three days. Then you've got the urethane materials, so the polyurethanes. They bring us up that extra step, and then you have vacuum insulation. It's expensive. It's a multi-part component. You know, you've got your internal silica, and you've got your barrier materials. They're your big three. And the big challenge that I've found personally is that when we look around at the industry now is that everybody is fixated on solving things based on a change that we don't really know what the change is going to be. So we're all hedging our bets a little bit. And we're all worried about packaging waste regulations, right? That's the big ticket. We sort of forget that packaging waste isn't about product. It's about industry. It's industry change. You have to force industry change. So people worry about polystyrene as being a bad product. They ban it, and they don't want to use it in a company, but in truth, polystyrene is hugely recyclable, a really, really good product. It doesn't mean it's in the absence of an infrastructure, it does mean we've got to look at other things.

The way I've looked at it is “how do we solve every one of these three levels?” At the first level, polystyrene - well, we can say, "Okay, we can solve that with cellulose-based products." We can almost solve it with quite simple corrugate design and layers of corrugate. We kind of meet that bar, and I think that's your first stage. You get over the first two to three days of distribution insulation. When you look one level higher at urethanes or the vacuum insulations, then you really start to get into the problems, and that's a real big problem, because polyurethane, absolutely not recyclable. Hopefully it will be. There's huge amounts of mattresses being made every day, they really need to be recycled in the future, but that's for the mattress people.

I wanted to find a material that met that bracket. This year I'll be introducing that. We're working with chemical engineers to find new materials, and that's the driver for us. We're a very practical company. I'll be showing a product this year that's made from 100% recycled plastic waste. So consumer waste can be re-recycled, if you will, an infinite number of times without losing its thermal capability, and it works better than polyurethanes. For the first time, we've got something that will do that, and we're in a bit of a fun time right now. It's that moment of technological and environmental change where we don't know what the right answer's going to be. As I said, everyone's kind of guessing and picking and choosing, worried about regulations that are here, but not here yet. So I think for the moment, if I was just like every other engineer out there and every other company, we should just be looking everywhere we possibly can. Also learning from other industries. The building industry's got the same problems as we have. The consumer products industry has the same problems we have. We can normally find the answers with each other - you know, someone else will have solved it for us, and then we just piggyback on top.

Lab results are great, but the real world is unpredictable. How do we make sure packaging holds up when a shipment is stuck on a hot airport tarmac for hours?

It's all about good risk and understanding risk. A long time ago, I was fortunate enough to work with some great people in pharma around risk analysis. We used to get asked the question of, "what if", you know. "What if it's left on the tarmac? What if this?" And my response was always, "what if a meteor falls?" So I think you have to take a very practical approach and say, "Absolutely. You're absolutely right. Lab gives us enough answers to start. We should design our lab testing around the real world, but we shouldn't go too far because if we start designing for the what if, then the what if list never ends," or we go through a sensible FMEA process, and then we start to understand, "what risks matter to me?"

There's always that funny example I'd always say to somebody. They say, "well, what happens if it gets left on the tarmac for 12 hours? How will you design around that?" And probably my simple answer is, "well, I shouldn't need to. That's when you need to sack your logistics service provider." I think there's a little bit in there to have that open communication. So as an organization with my team, at the technical side of the business and at our commercial side, we start the conversation saying, "What does your world look like?" And we don't try and design magic bullet shippers that meet everybody's needs, because I don't think everybody should pay for everybody's distribution thermal problems. We design solutions that meet people's specific world, and you design around that. The lab tests we do should simulate that environment to a sensible level. It should include some risks, but those risks will be chosen based on the ones that are the priority, which will be, it's going to see forty degrees for six hours. There's that, there's that window of neglect. If it sees more than six hours of neglect or extreme, then it's probably a conversation about how the entire process is being managed, rather than suitability of packaging because people shouldn't be overpaying for packaging. They should be paying for the right packaging for the job. There's always that rule, isn't there, with light bulb packaging, if you remember the old Edison light bulbs that we used to have before going to energy ones. If you ever noticed, you'd buy a glass light bulb inside of the thinnest cardboard box ever, and it's a strange thing to think, "Well, I don't understand why a light bulb comes in such a thin cardboard box." And the truth of the matter is the value of the light bulb was so low that the cardboard box, no matter how thin it was, was just enough, and it's just right. It's perfectly designed for the value of that thing and the risk it would encounter because how often did you get home with a broken light bulb? It's probably almost never, but you will look at it and go, "I can't believe such a flimsy box protected such a fragile item." Right? But it's the right packaging for the job always.

With the rise of one-of-a-kind cell and gene therapies, the stakes for delivery have never been higher. How must cold chain infrastructure evolve to ensure a 100% success rate for these patient-specific products?

I think actually it probably has to change quite massively. We are used to making business to business-centric packaging, and we are going to move into packaging that needs to be slightly more consumer-centric or end user-centric in a way. At the very least, we're going to want to include the end user in returning it to us if we're going to be, you know, good from a sustainability point of view. So I think we're going to - there's going to be more options, probably smaller boxes going to lots more places. So your network and supply becomes far more sort of, you know, like spans wider to more people. You're not going just from an A to a B, you're going to an A to almost the entire alphabet at that stage. And the people that are receiving them, in some cases are smaller organizations, and they aren't going to have the knowledge. So we're going to need to educate a new group of people about temperature control packaging safely. We're going to need to understand their world, just like we understood the world of larger scale distribution.

I find it really exciting moving towards that end user area. I also think because there's a value just in general that educating the end user on these types of things is critical because that's normally where we fall down on reuse, recycling, return. It's when it always gets to the last point. I've seen some wonderful photos of hospitals filled with EPS containers that they don't know how to get rid of, and you sort of wonder, "Well, you do know how to get rid of it, or we could help you get rid of it, but I don't think you want to. You don't have the time or the person to do that." And it would be great to get into those places and help them to understand that. And as we are getting more and more involved with that cell and gene therapy, or radiopharm is another area where it's almost direct to patient and extremely time sensitive, then we have to become smarter about our infrastructure, our logistics service providing. It’s also packaging for patient, not packaging for product at that point, is probably where it becomes quite important. I was always taught in packaging design, it's something so easy your grandmother could use it or open it. And we almost want to get to that point where, you know, we're designing for people there.

How has the approach to thermal packaging changed in the last decade? Are we still solving the same basic insulation problems, or has the focus shifted entirely toward data, visibility, proactive monitoring and especially sustainability?

If I was to be honest, and I always use a word that people don't like, we are still making picnic boxes for pharmaceuticals. We're still making temperature control boxes, and the majority of this world is still using the materials that we were using ten, twenty years ago. In the twenty-five years I've been designing systems for this world, that general requirement of understanding somebody's world and then giving them the solution to meet their requirement hasn't changed. There are just more peripherals now. There are more bolt-ons and add-ons. It's almost the same when we drive a car, right? We all drove a car twenty-five years ago, and the need to drive a car is still here. It's just now we have power steering, electric windows, we have satellite navigation. All of those things are there. We have Spotify, we have all of those tools in the car. Still, we need the car. And I think the good products and the good new innovations are going to be the things that always point back to helping the system get to where it is. I think what will happen is you'll separate the reusable stuff from the pointless activity, you know, the just for the sake of it things. And I think we have to be careful about that.

There's a lot of potential for creating a lot of “just for the sake of it” innovation. And we want to be smart about that because everything costs us more now. Moving product costs us significantly more. As we start to move products towards patients, it becomes more visible. We have to be very careful about that. Our industry is built on experts and having experts in our industry, and I think we absolutely want to retain that. We need that individual, those experts in companies, and I think as long as those people are bringing in those peripherals or bringing in those, you know, those extra parts, the data monitoring and the track and tracing, then I think if they're using them in the right way, then there's huge, huge value in having them all. Huge value.

My most favorite time I have at events like this, at LogiPharma now, is meeting the data monitoring companies and understanding what they do because the first thing I do is go back to my lab and take samples and show my lab and say, "How does this fit in what you've designed? Have you made space for it because that's what people are going to be using? How do you know? How do we consider that?" I really enjoy that. So the addition of them is great, but I just think we have to wield them with care and not bring them in for the sake of it, you know. At the end of the day, everybody should get exactly the products or packaging and service they need, but they shouldn't pay more than they can afford. And that's the truth. We shouldn't be making people overpay, and equally, we shouldn't be making people pay for other people's problems. So yeah. So just because one person needs track and trace doesn't mean they all do, so let's not integrate it into one hundred percent of our solutions. We should, you know, make the system for the company, make it for their world.

As logistics becomes more automated and data-driven, what is something that cold chain managers need to master and look out for, especially over the next 5 years?

Make sure that people have the experience and the expertise, and as long as they're the people that have access to that technology, you won't have a problem. I think we always run the risk of moving to a world of over-reliance on those types of technologies, and that's not where we want to be in this world. It's still quite a nuanced industry, and everybody, I always say, wants their own flavor of ice cream in this world, in this thermal distribution world, and nobody's doing it the same. Everyone would love to, but I don't think people can. And that means these cold chain managers need to know their world. They need to know their environment, and then they plug in the supporting software and the AI infrastructures and build it in. And absolutely use them as a support. Don't build dependency on them. And that's not because I'm a pessimist and I'm worried about a robot revolution. It's more just a matter of that I think there's nothing better than having the expert capability to resolve and react and respond quickly to changes or issues or problems. The last thing you want is to have a cold chain excursion and not to know why, and the only reason you wouldn't know why is because you relied on something to take care of it for you.

References

1. Introspective Market Research. Cold Chain Pharmaceuticals Market Size, Share & Forecast. Published 2025. Accessed April 22, 2026. https://introspectivemarketresearch.com/press-release/cold-chain-pharmaceuticals-market/
2. GlobeNewswire. Cell & gene therapy cold chain logistics market outlook 2021-2031: global revenues set to reach $4.47 billion by 2031. GlobeNewswire. Published January 22, 2026. Accessed April 22, 2026. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/01/22/3223564/28124/en/Cell-Gene-Therapy-Cold-Chain-Logistics-Market-Outlook-2021-2031-Global-Revenues-Set-to-Reach-4-47-Billion-by-2031.html