We built the software we needed after five years of living in the data problem.
PackR8 is a product of Circular Vision — an Utrecht-based sustainability consultancy that has guided more than 40 European brands through PPWR readiness. After watching the same data problem break the same teams year after year, we built what we wished already existed.
Packaging compliance is not a dashboard problem. It's a data problem.
For five years, Circular Vision ran PPWR readiness projects for European brands — food, beverage, personal care, household, pharma. Project after project, we watched the same pattern: smart sustainability leads with real strategies, stalled by packaging data that lived in 11 tabs of a spreadsheet maintained by someone in another country.
The industry's response was to sell dashboards. Beautiful charts built on inputs nobody could defend to an auditor. When the auditor actually arrived, the dashboards collapsed — not because the charts were wrong, but because the numbers they rendered had no paper trail.
We started PackR8 because the real problem wasn't visualisation. It was that there was no system of record for packaging data at all. The ERP held finished goods. The PLM held structural design. The sustainability team held a spreadsheet. The supplier emails held PDFs. No single place knew what was actually on shelf, with what evidence, in what market.
PackR8 treats packaging data the way every other discipline already treats its data: as infrastructure. One record. Full version history. Evidence pinned to every claim. Role-aware views so sustainability, packaging, and compliance can each work in context without stepping on each other. From that foundation, PPWR readiness, EPR filings, and Declarations of Conformity become outputs — not annual fire drills.
Make European packaging compliance boring.
For the sustainability lead who wants to focus on circular strategy instead of reassembling last year's spreadsheets. For the packaging manager who wants to ship new packs without playing email archaeologist. For the compliance team that wants EPR filings and DoCs to be defensible without heroics.
Boring means reliable. Reliable means the regulator stops being a threat and becomes a checklist. That's the bar.
Three principles that show up in every release.
These aren't aspirational — they're the decisions we make when two product paths diverge and we have to pick one.
From consulting across 40+ brands to shipping the platform.
Circular Vision started in Utrecht in 2021 as a sustainability consultancy focused on packaging. We worked with European brands on the technical side of PPWR readiness — recyclability assessments, recycled-content strategies, EPR scheme navigation across NL, DE, BE, FR, ES, and PL.
The work was useful. But every engagement started with the same 6-week data sprint: get the packaging specs out of PDFs, reconcile them against the ERP, chase suppliers for missing evidence, and rebuild the source of truth from scratch. We were charging for strategic advice and spending 60% of the time on data plumbing.
PackR8 is what happens when consultants get tired of rebuilding the same plumbing every time. It codifies the methodology we developed across those 40+ brands into a product your own team can run — without us in the room.
We're still Circular Vision. The consulting practice continues, and in fact still does the PackR8 onboarding personally. But the software is the part that scales.
How we got here.
A shortened version of the story — the parts that are relevant to why PackR8 looks the way it does.
Talk to us.
The person you book a demo with is one of the consultants who shaped PackR8. No SDR, no discovery calls, no funnel. Just a 30-minute conversation about your packaging programme.