Flexible Packaging Association (FPA) industry data & buyer's guide

The US flexible packaging industry, counted by its own trade association. The Flexible Packaging Association - the Annapolis organization speaking for the bags, pouches, labels, liners and rollstock that make up America's second-largest packaging segment - aggregates four data assets, and this dataset normalizes them into analysis-ready rows: $51.5 billion in direct economic impact, more than $151 billion in total contribution to the US economy, nearly 400,000 jobs supported mapped down to states and congressional districts, plus a member buyer's guide of converters and suppliers classified by membership type and location.

Why analysts bother: flexible packaging touches essentially every shelf in the country, yet its headline numbers usually arrive as press-release fragments rather than anything you could pivot on a Tuesday afternoon. Here the macroeconomics land next to the sourcing layer - citable impact figures sitting in the same table as a company-level directory you can build a supplier map from. Get a sample of this dataset cut to your segments, or start from the paper & plastic packaging products & materials hub.

Four rows exactly as they land - two headline economics observations, one directory-entry shape, one report-indicator shape:

record_type        : economic_impact_headline
metric             : direct_economic_impact
value              : $51.5 billion
year               : 2025
basis              : FPA / John Dunham & Associates economic impact study

record_type           : economic_impact_total
metric                : total_economic_contribution
value                 : over $151 billion
jobs_supported        : nearly 400,000
geographic_rollup     : national, state, congressional district

record_type       : supplier_directory_entry
company_name      : <FPA member company>
member_type       : Converter | Associate | International Converter | Supporting
state_province    : <US state or province>
guide_edition     : 2026 Buyer's Guide

record_type       : soi_report_indicator
end_use_segment   : retail_food | institutional_food | industrial |
                    medical_pharmaceutical | consumer_products
indicators        : industry growth, M&A activity, US versus global markets,
                    imports and exports, expense breakdowns
edition           : State of the U.S. Flexible Packaging Industry, 2025

The first two rows are the numbers every packaging story quotes; the third is the analytical unit that makes this dataset more than a slogan - one member company, typed by role and geography, repeated across the whole membership roster. Stack the directory rows and you have a supply-market map; group the report indicators instead and you have demand-side context - which end-use segments carry the volume, where consolidation is running - in the same table as the dollars.

Five fields carry the core - three describing the sourcing layer, two carrying the economics. Definitions were written up during the August 2026 research pass from the directory's own filter labels and the economic impact study's published figures, so they describe what is actually reported rather than guessed column names.

Core fields - full definitions and examples in the dictionary table below:

• company_name - the member company as listed in the buyer's guide.
• member_type - Converter, Associate, International Converter or Supporting: the fastest way to separate film makers from the material and equipment suppliers around them.
• state_province - the location filter attached to every listing.
• economic_impact_value - dollar contribution attributed to the industry by the 2025 economic impact model, $51.5B direct at national level.
• jobs_supported - employment carried by the same model, nearly 400,000 nationally.

Additional fields on request - present in the association's published material but not yet normalized into the base table, so they are scoped per engagement rather than promised blind: total_contribution_billion_usd, edition_year, end_use_segment, geographic_rollup. Ask for any of them in your sample scoping conversation and they arrive typed and defined like the five above.

Three chips summarize the footprint:

• Geography: United States, with the economic impact model resolved all the way down to states and congressional districts; the buyer's guide additionally lists International Converter members outside the country.
• Time frame: edition-based rather than rolling - the State of the U.S. Flexible Packaging Industry report and the economic impact analysis both carry 2025 editions, while the buyer's guide ships as the 2026 edition, with the Market Tracker running as continuous monitoring between editions.
• Granularity: two levels in one table - industry-level aggregates (impact dollars, jobs, end-use splits) and company-level directory entries (one row per member firm, typed by role and location).

Set against the wider catalog - average quality score 7.81 across all 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs - this slice scores 7/10, reflecting genuinely citable headline economics and a real company-level directory, docked because the deepest statistical tables stay inside the association's own reporting and the directory's full company count is not disclosed publicly. Where it ranks in the industry: best paper & plastic packaging products & materials datasets.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You pick the channel and the cadence; the field dictionary above travels unchanged across all three. Bulk files suit annual-cycle workflows - one refreshed industry table landing in the warehouse when each new edition arrives - while structured payloads suit products that need to answer "how large is the US flexible packaging market, and who supplies it?" the moment someone types it. Because the economics move on an edition rhythm but your questions arrive daily, many teams hold a standing snapshot and pull deltas when a new edition drops. Cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project. Get a sample of this dataset scoped to your segments before any recurring arrangement exists.

Ranked by how directly a segment ledger with a sourcing layer answers their day job:

1. Sales & growth teams. The buyer's guide reads as a pre-segmented target list - converters separated from associates, filtered by state - so territory planning starts from the actual membership roster rather than a stitched-together guess. Deeper workflows on sales growth teams use cases.
2. Market researchers & consultants. The citable base layer for sizing US flexible packaging: $51.5B direct and $151B+ total impact attributed to the association's own economic impact study, quotable without a chain of secondary sources. More on market researchers use cases.
3. Competitive intelligence & product teams. Member type plus location tells you which converters compete in which formats and geographies - the skeleton of a competitive map before any revenue estimate gets attached. See competitive intel product teams use cases.
4. Investors & quants. A second-largest-segment claim backed by an employment and output model gives packaging diligence a defensible anchor - and the end-use splits show which demand pockets sit inside it. More on investors & quants use cases.
5. E-commerce & packaging operations. Shortlist film, pouch and liner suppliers against the directory before re-pricing d2c packaging, and sanity-check a incumbent quote against the breadth of the converting base.
6. Journalists, academics & students. Association-attributable figures stable enough to survive an editor - the industry's own accounting rather than someone else's chart of it.

Sales & Growth Teams get the rare dataset where the prospect list is the data - every converter and associate member typed, located and ready to route territories around. Market Researchers & Consultants get citation-grade segment sizing: headline dollars and employment attributed to a named economic impact study, so a market-size slide never disagrees with its own footnote. Competitive Intelligence Teams get structural read-through - member rosters by class and state show where converting capacity concentrates long before a directory becomes a market-share chart. Investors & Quants get a defensible top-down anchor for the whole flexible segment, with end-use splits to test which demand story the dollars actually support. E-commerce Operators get supplier discovery without the spreadsheet archaeology. Journalists & Academics get attributable figures that survive both an editor and a peer reviewer.

Notes that pair well with this page:

• Paper & Plastic Packaging Products & Materials hub - the pooled industry view, from government waste-flow series to association guidance libraries.
• NAPCOR PET packaging recycling & market data - the material-specific companion: PET collection rates and recycling volumes for the rigid side of the aisle, ideal when a flexible-versus-rigid comparison needs both halves counted the same way. The head-to-head lives at vs NAPCOR PET packaging recycling & market data.
• TAPPI pulp & paper technical data and buyer's guide - the upstream twin: another association pairing a statistics program with a member directory, useful for tracing flexible packaging back through film substrates to fibre.
• PMMI business intelligence packaging market reports - the machinery-side view: processing and packaging equipment intelligence that pairs naturally with a converter roster when the question is capacity rather than demand.
• US EPA Containers and Packaging: Product-Specific Data - the downstream ledger: generation and recovery for containers and packaging in municipal waste, the end-of-life counterweight to the industry's economic contribution.
• Provenance note - published by the Flexible Packaging Association (FPA), the US trade association for flexible packaging, whose State of the U.S. Flexible Packaging Industry report, economic impact study with John Dunham & Associates, Market Tracker and member buyer's guide form the primary record of the segment.