Welcome to December’s update from our friends at Saxco, on market dynamic in beverage packaging.
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Another month of calm
November typically marks the end of a new harvest and the middle of our busiest sales quarter. October’s government shutdown created unbelievable market uncertainty. But with the system back up and Thanksgiving almost normal, stability returned rather than the predicted surges or collapses by pundits from both sides. Still, questions remain about the future of our economic recovery prospects. For now, it is a reprieve, allowing us to regro for the new year.
Market dynamics
The delayed reports from Commerce and the Bureau of Labor Statistics hav started to trickle in, bringing some key takeaways:
- Unemployment is holding at 3.8%.
- Inflation easing to 2.3% YoY.
- Consumer spending down ~2% from Q3, but no hint of a cliff.
As we close out the year and look to 2026, the focus will be on staying agile both supply planning and capturing winery sales and marketing opportunity The key trends persist: Steady demand, no major swings, and a growing gap between spenders and cautious households. Next year’s success will depend on how quickly you read market dynamics and adjust. Who you target and how the market recovers will shape the effectiveness of your strategy. Deloitte projects 3.5% growth in holiday spending. High-income household will spend 7% more, while lower-income households plan to spend 4% less. Lower-income households are turning to value products, while premium segments stay steady. Brands are dividing their manufacturing and marketing to address both groups.
Steady-going operationally Packaging material deliveries for glass, cans, and closures in November wer consistent, meeting the expected lead times without any notable delays or disruptions. Product quality and availability remained stable across all packaging types. Overseas freight costs for glass, cans, and closures eased slightly to $5,800 per container in November, down from $6,200 in October.
While this is still above the roughly $4,500 level seen earlier in the year, the were no additional shipping bottlenecks or material shortages affecting packaging supply. On the operational front, production trends held steady as well. Glass furnaces kept a steady pace in November. In transportation, trends stayed similar to last month. Diesel sat at $3.42 a gallon, rail hit 94% on-time, ports stayed quiet, and trucking maintained us booking windows. After the volatility of the last few years, these predictable patterns make that chaos feel distant. The big date on the calendar is December 15th, when the anti-dumping and countervailing duty rulings finally land. Everyone is watching, but no one w be shocked by whatever the final judgment is. As year-end approaches, our main focus is the 2026 outlook.
Bottled Tidbits – The whole glass Christmas ornament thing actually started because of a challenging nut harvest. Go back in time to Lauscha, Germany, 1847, when a drought wiped out the nut harvest, which sounds small until you realize people literally hung nuts and fruits on their Christmas trees. No nuts no ornaments, no holiday cheer.
The local glassblowers, already scrambling for side income, had to improvise. One of them, Hans Greiner, basically said, “If nature won’t give us nuts, I’ll jus make them myself,” and started blowing glass versions. That simple workaround became the first generation of glass ornaments – better-looking and far more durable than the real thing.
Fast forward to 1880: Frank Winfield Woolworth is on a buying trip, sees the glass ornaments, and basically thinks: “No way Americans pay for this stuff”. H buys $25 worth just to try them out. They sell out in two days. Ten years later he’s importing $800 million of glass ornaments annually. And Lauscha? It had turned into a full-on ornament powerhouse; 5,000 glassblowers making almost every Christmas ornament on Earth.
Here’s the most interesting part: The methods for making the ornaments beca a nexus of innovation, pushing the entire glass industry forward. The silverin technique developed to make ornaments shine proved crucial for early vacuum bottles. And Max Eckardt’s machine from 1908 that crimped ornament caps? Bottle manufacturers took that idea and turned it into automated capping line Even the flashy metallic coatings you see on wine bottles today trace back to formulas created for Christmas baubles.
So this small German town, reacting to a poor fruit-and-nut harvest, ended u inventing much of the glass industry. It is a reminder that big leaps often com from refusing to accept, “That’s just how it is this year.” A useful perspective a we face tough headwinds.
