Supporting the Sustainable Packaging Ecosystem
Helping Atlantic Packaging strengthen relationships & accelerate innovation
When we think about innovation, we tend to focus on breakthrough technologies, disruptive startups, and visionary leaders. But none of these exist in isolation. Real transformation depends on the relationships, trust, and collaboration that connect people around a shared goal. Over the last four years, our partnership with Atlantic Packaging, the nation’s largest independent packaging company, and A New Earth Project, their global sustainability and ocean health initiative, has given us a firsthand look at what that can look like in practice. The project has reinforced something we’ve come to believe deeply, that meaningful transformation starts by bringing the right people together. We used See Change Sessions to do that for Atlantic. See Change is a gathering co-founded by Signal Kitchen where a dynamic series of experiences seamlessly blend work and play to ignite creativity, change perspectives, and build effective (and unlikely) relationships across impact-focused organizations.
“Our partnership with See Change has been years in the making, and I’m grateful for how it has evolved over time. They have delivered solid support on the core production logistics that matter most — the behind-the-scenes execution that allows us to focus on programming and outcomes. Their commitment to working through challenges in real time is profound. What stands out most is the total professionalism of their team. Every person we’ve worked with has been responsive, prepared, and willing to go ABCD — above and beyond the call of duty — to get the job done right.”
— Don Meek, Managing Director, Atlantic Packaging / A New Earth Project
Creating the Conditions for Collaboration
Atlantic saw a need for more meaningful ways to connect people across the packaging industry and the broader innovation ecosystem, not just through traditional conferences or business transactions, but through shared experiences, fresh ideas, and meaningful relationships.
Don Meek (Managing Director of A New Earth Project) and Wes Carter (CEO of Atlantic) had brought people to See Change to further that goal for two years before a breakthrough moment with one of the company’s most senior leaders. After attending See Change, Atlantic’s Senior VP of Sales pulled Don aside and said, “I get it now. I get why you guys do it this way. I came with customers and left with friends.”
That shift captures something fundamental about the See Change approach. By bringing people together through shared experiences, small-group conversations, and time away from their usual business environments, we help create the conditions for relationships to deepen in ways that traditional business settings rarely allow. For Atlantic, those relationships became part of a broader effort to connect the packaging industry around sustainable innovation.
With See Change as an annual platform, more people from Atlantic and beyond became involved in the movement. The network grew, the relationships deepened, and what started as a simple desire to connect became a much broader ecosystem of people and organizations working together, sharing ideas, and creating new opportunities.
“See Change offered a refreshing take on the challenges facing the packaging industry. The structure facilitated a level of ‘zooming out’ that went beyond anything I’ve experienced, pushing me to think critically about sustainability in a whole new way. What I found most valuable was the focus on solutions, agnostic of material type. The collaborative lab portion was particularly insightful, generating ideas that felt both innovative and pragmatic. In an industry often stuck in its ways, See Change provided a much-needed space for fresh thinking and cross-industry problem-solving.”
— Cole Hermann Structural Packaging Innovation Lead, Google
From Connection to Investment
Through See Change, Atlantic Packaging brought innovative startups together with key members of the packaging supply chain, including customers, manufacturers, and researchers, to help accelerate the development and adoption of next-generation solutions. Along the way, Atlantic leaders built new relationships, discovered promising technologies, and found fresh momentum around sustainability and innovation.
One such connection was between Atlantic’s Wes Carter and Julia Marsh, Co-Founder and CEO of Sway, a startup pioneering seaweed-based packaging as an alternative to conventional plastics. Their meeting at See Change helped open new growth opportunities for Sway while advancing Atlantic’s commitment to sustainable packaging.
Over time, these experiences sparked a broader ambition within Atlantic to move beyond connecting promising innovators with the industry and play a more direct role in helping them grow. That ambition led to the creation of New Earth Ventures, Atlantic Packaging’s venture capital fund investing in entrepreneurs developing the next generation of sustainable packaging solutions, led by managing director Matt Saunders.
Atlantic’s role as a thought leader in the industry.
Atlantic has been a leader in packaging innovation for 80 years. In recent years, the company has turned its focus toward reducing packaging waste and accelerating the shift to a more circular industry. See Change offers a platform for Atlantic to share its knowledge and expertise across the industry, bringing colleagues and competitors alike into the same conversation to move progress forward collectively.
Atlantic’s Director of Sustainability, Caroline DeLoach, brings deep experience in manufacturing, circularity, and the emerging Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policy landscape, which is shaping decisions for companies and legislators across the U.S.
Sometimes the biggest outcomes are collective.
Not every ecosystem outcome looks like a startup partnership or venture fund. Over the years, recurring conversations surfaced through a shared frustration about the lack of alignment on sustainability standards in packaging. Different organizations were using different frameworks, making it difficult for the industry to move forward together.
Those conversations ultimately contributed to the creation of the Packaging Standards Compass, helping establish greater alignment around sustainability standards and best practices. No single organization could solve that challenge alone. But ecosystems create opportunities for shared challenges to become shared solutions.
Additionally, See Change served as a launchpad for the PaperFlex Consortium, an industry-wide collaboration convened by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and bringing together some of the packaging industry’s largest companies to advance more sustainable packaging solutions.
What packaging can teach every industry.
The lessons from the packaging track at See Change extend far beyond packaging itself. What began as a handful of packaging leaders gathering in Vermont evolved into an ecosystem with year-round relationships, new partnerships, industry-wide initiatives, and new pathways for innovation and investment. There’s an opportunity for any industry facing complex challenges to create the conditions for the right people to come together and achieve outcomes that exceed what any single organization could achieve alone.
Our role at See Change is not to fund the next startup, broker every partnership, or solve every challenge. Our role is to create the conditions where those things become possible. We’re excited to help other industries come together to build toward positive change.
Interested in building your industry’s ecosystem?
If you’re working to accelerate innovation, align stakeholders, or convene a community around a shared challenge, we’d love to explore what that could look like together and how we can help. Sometimes the most important thing an organization can do isn’t to create the next breakthrough, but to create the conditions for one to emerge.