AIPIA & AWA Congress Wrap: McCormick Brand Challenge winners highlight Connectivity | 15-07-2025 |

McCormick, ‘the global leader in flavour’ hosted this year’s Brand Challenge at the AIPIA & AWA World Congress held in Amsterdam at the end of June. The company, which operates in 150 countries and boasts a portfolio of famous Brands, including  Schwartz – the UK’s #1 brand for herbs, spices and seasonings and French’s - the world’s number one mustard brand, had opened the Congress with an enthusiastic endorsement of Smart Packaging.

Jessica Krauze EMEA growth platforms marketing manager for McCormick explained how the company is eager to embrace smart packaging as a critical pillar in its innovation and sustainability strategy. In her keynote, she shared how it’s integrating connected, intelligent, and sustainable packaging solutions to enable them to enhance product authenticity, improve supply chain transparency, and elevate consumer engagement. She offered an exclusive insight into the company’s growth roadmap and future ambitions as it navigates the fast-evolving landscape of smart packaging technologies.

She and her colleague Olivier Rattin, global packaging innovation director for the company, said they were excited to participate in both the Congress and the Brand Challenge, where a dozen companies had just three minutes each to pitch their ideas. As usual the dynamic session was moderated by AIPIA’s managing director Eef de Ferrante who ensures that the ‘pitchers’ keep to their allotted time and that the room is highly charged with energy to keep the momentum of the Challenge at fever pitch!

In the final outcome three companies were selected by the McCormick team to continue discussions about how they can help the spice and flavours giant to further utilise these technologies across their product range: 

Scantrust: Nathan Anderson pitched his companies QR code solutions. He believes companies need to stop fighting with their QR code tools and tame millions of QR codes across thousands of SKUs with ease. Run global, regional, or language-based campaigns with an advanced URL redirection engine., as well as automate tasks with batch/ API upload and custom QR code download options.

He briefly showed how to link QR codes to product landing pages with a no-code builder and  how they can ’breeze’ through multi-lingual, personalized landing pages and avoid costly changes and waiting for product website updates. He hopes to show McCormick how to Gget more from its QR codes – including anti-counterfeiting and digital labelling for E.U. regulatory compliance.

AmbAI: Steve Statler pitched a very  topical themes in his 3 minutes. His premise is that we are moving into a world where AI Agents and Chatbots are inserting themselves between customers and brands, with unparalleled intimacy and soon purchasing power on behalf of their users.  

This is a threat and an opportunity for brands who risk being commoditized.  If OpenAI has all the product data and the most intimate customer data, they can take on companies such as Amazon and commoditize the CPGs

His company will leverage best of breed AI/LLMs, but help customers control and keep track of all the data/DPPs about all the things they have, centralize and store the customer’s data locally on their devices, allow a direct connection between that customer and brands like McCormick so that the customer gets better recipes,  shopping lists, and the brand gets new visibility into their customers use of their products and a new direct sales channel.  

He explained that the power of AI is harnessed and contained by using a mix of smart packaging, customer centralized local data control and an architecture that augments AI to harness it but doesn’t put it in control.

Experience is Everything: Paul Simmonet strongly advocates Connected Packaging as the next big positive disruption within the marketing landscape. It will bring brands and consumers closer together, put clients further in control of their own marketing eco-system and prove hugely cost effective as well as highly efficient in engaging consumers and growing sales.

His company is a first-of-a kind specialist in always-on packaging,  providing end-to-end experiences for companies looking to maximise the value of their connected packaging with their customer base around the world. The team of creative, technology and marketing specialists are geared to capitalise on the explosive growth in connectivity worldwide.

Paul is also the co-founder of the Interactive Brand Packaging Network (IBPN) which was launched during the Congress and was enthusiastically received by McCormick and all the Brands and Retailers who attended.

Following the Challenge Eef de Ferrante commented “This is always a great way to round off the Congress and the strong support we had throughout the event, from McCormick and all the Brands, members and delegates present, shows we are clearly going in the right direction. We’re already looking forward to the next event in June 2026.”    

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