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Following the success of its inaugural edition, Esko Unboxing Live returns as the annual virtual event for packaging professionals ready to shape what's next.
Join a global community of brand owners, converters, packaging experts, and industry leaders for two inspiring half days dedicated to the trends, technologies, and strategies transforming packaging. From the rise of AI-powered workflows and evolving compliance requirements to accelerating speed to market and advancing sustainability, Unboxing Live brings together the insights and innovations you need to stay ahead.
What you can expect:
This year, each day begins with a Plenary Session, bringing all attendees together to explore the key trends shaping the future of packaging. The plenary is followed by two dedicated content tracks, allowing participants to dive deeper into the topics most relevant to their business. Whether you're a packaging professional at a CPG or Life Sciences brand, or a Printer, Converter, or Packaging Service Provider, you'll find a dedicated track tailored to your industry's unique challenges, priorities, and opportunities.
Whether you're leading digital transformation, optimizing artwork and prepress, ensuring regulatory compliance, or driving sustainable packaging initiatives, Unboxing Live will equip you with practical insights and actionable ideas to prepare your business for the future.
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Experience two half-days of cutting-edge packaging industry knowledge and solution-driven insights
All hours are listed in CET (Central European Time)
In this opening session, we’ll set the stage for two inspiring half-days of learning, exchange, and discovery. Get ready to explore fresh insights, hear diverse perspectives, and discover how Esko and the wider packaging community are driving progress together.
Jan De Roeck
Director Industry Relations & Strategy Esko
Where stands AI in 2027 and what are the key shifts every organization must understand to lead in this new age? We examine how AI is driving operational efficiency in a 'better, cheaper and faster' mindset and what it takes to truly embed AI into digital transformation across teams, including how to identify the key use cases that matter. Learn how AI can scale efficiency while preserving the human touch to shape the future.
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Dado Van Peteghem
International Keynote Speaker & Author
Packaging is entering a new era. From PPWR and growing sustainability requirements to the shift to 2D codes, the rise of AI and the growing demand for connected, compliant and data-driven packaging, CPG brands are facing a rapidly changing landscape. In this session, we’ll explore the key trends shaping the future of packaging and what they mean for brand packaging professionals — helping brands understand what’s changing and prepare for what comes next.
Gwenael Bultelle
Category Specialist - CPG Esko
Packaging teams are under growing pressure to deliver more work, more quickly, while managing increasing complexity across people, processes and systems. In this session, Chris Janczar will share Esko’s vision for packaging intelligence and the roadmap toward more connected, automated and data-driven workflows. Discover how emerging innovations can help brands reduce manual effort, improve collaboration and compress packaging processes from months to days.
Chris Janczar
Brand - Product Offering Manager Esko
Discover how AI can help in-house graphic-production teams and pre-media agencies increase throughput, reduce repetitive work and scale their operations. This session explores how intelligent automation can support the interpretation, execution and checking of artwork changes—helping teams deliver more work with existing resources while maintaining accuracy and control.
Hear directly from industry leaders about the business challenges they are preparing for, the role AI is expected to play in their plans, and how these priorities are impacting the way packaging artwork is created, managed, reviewed, and approved.
Gwenael Bultelle
Category Specialist - CPG Esko
Jackie Leslie
Category Specialist - Life Sciences Esko
A small packaging error can lead to costly rework, delayed launches, recalls and damage to consumer trust. Discover how automated quality and compliance checks can identify potential problems earlier in the artwork process. This session will explore how Esko Verify and Comply capabilities help teams compare content against approved requirements, reduce repetitive manual inspection and give reviewers greater confidence before packaging is released to production.
Rakesh Edavalath
Product Director Esko
Against a background of geopolitical uncertainty and crises, packaging converters are facing a perfect storm of challenges. Brand owners demand shorter lead times, regulators continue to raise the bar, sustainability expectations are accelerating, and margins remain under relentless pressure. How can packaging businesses remain competitive and protect their margins while investing in the future?
Join moderator Jan De Roeck for a fast-paced discussion exploring the trends shaping packaging production today. Drawing on global market insights and real-world operational experience, expect candid opinions, market intelligence, and practical lessons from the front lines of packaging production.
In just 20 minutes, you'll gain practical perspectives on where the industry is heading and what successful converters are doing now to stay ahead.
Jan De Roeck
Director Industry Relations & Strategy Esko
Unnecessary process loops, manual handoffs and approval delays can slow down even the best-run packaging operations. Discover how to remove these bottlenecks, streamline your workflows and keep jobs moving faster with a more connected ecosystem and WebCenter Pack.
Geert De Proost
Director Product Offering - Converter Software Esko
AI is omnipresent but how does it help converter businesses becoming more profitable and scalable. This session is filled with tangible examples that can change your business today. From job onboarding to Prepress to Layout, color and quality - at Esko AI is being leveraged to support accelerated cycle time every step of the way - increasing job capacity with the same team.
Geert De Proost
Director Product Offering - Converter Software Esko
A brand change comes in. Twenty SKUs need updating. How much of the repetitive prepress work can AI take off your hands?
In this live session, we’ll take the job from first change to production-ready artwork in ArtPro+ and DeskPack, showing how AI embedded in the prepress workflow can help teams work faster and smarter.
Everything you’ll see is available today — and we’ll finish with a glimpse of what’s coming next in 26.11.
Balaji Rengarajan
Product Manager | Structure & Graphics Esko
When planning, color, and automation work in isolation, efficiency is lost. Three Forces. One Flow. demonstrates how unifying these capabilities creates a smarter production engine—optimizing imposition, improving color predictability, and automating execution. The result is faster turnaround, better press utilization, and more sustainable production without added complexity.
John Murphy
Product Manager Esko
In this customer interview, QuarterPack GmbH shares how it uses Esko WebCenter and Automation Engine to connect customer collaboration with automated prepress workflows. The discussion will explore how this approach helps simplify processes, improve communication, increase flexibility, and support faster, more efficient job handling.
Christopher Weber
Regional Software Solutions Manager D-A-CH Esko
Alexander Gruber
CEO Quarterpack GmbH
Jan De Roeck
Director Industry Relations & Strategy Esko
Jan De Roeck
Director Industry Relations & Strategy Esko
Ulrike Quirmbach (ex.Unilever) and Uwe Dierking (alvons design) take us behind the scenes of a truly exciting packaging projects: a special Rexona edition for the DFB, the Deutsche Fussball-Bund, featuring the players of the Germany national football team. How to keep the global REXONA brand identity and how to present the full team on different type of packaging?
Flexographic printing combined with digital direct printing on paper or aerosol print on metal. Brand and agency, working hand in hand. This is what winners look like.
A session for brand owners, designers, and packaging professionals who want to see innovation in action — not just in theory.
Ulrike Quirmbach
Ex-Unilever
Uwe Dierking
Founder/Owner alvons design
See how Esko’s cloud platform, APIs and partner integrations connect packaging workflows across systems, teams and suppliers. Through a practical end-to-end demonstration, discover how brands can reduce manual handoffs, improve data flow and build a more connected, automated ecosystem around their existing processes.
Dries Vandenbussche
Esko
Packaging decisions have a direct impact on cost, sustainability goals, regulatory compliance, and the consumer experience. Discover how Esko's integrated structural design, 3D visualization, and pallet optimization solutions help brand owners create right-sized packaging that reduces material usage, improves logistics, accelerates stakeholder approvals, and ensures products are retail-ready before production begins. Learn how connecting these capabilities enables smarter decisions across the packaging lifecycle while balancing efficiency, compliance, and brand impact.
Susie Stitzel
Product Director Esko
As Brands grow, packaging operations can quickly become more complex. In this customer case study, discover how a growing brand transformed its packaging workflow to better manage increasing volumes, streamline collaboration, and build a scalable foundation for future growth.
Mid-sized pharmaceutical companies face many of the same artwork, compliance and coordination challenges as the world’s largest organizations—but often without the same resources or infrastructure.
This session explores how WebCenter Go can provide growing Life Sciences teams with structured workflows, centralized collaboration and controlled review and approval processes. Discover how organizations can improve visibility, reduce manual coordination and establish a scalable foundation for packaging artwork management.
James McMonigal
Pre Sales Solution Consultant Esko
AI offers significant opportunities to improve Life Sciences artwork processes while maintaining the accuracy, control and expert oversight required in a regulated environment. This session explores practical ways AI can assist teams with tasks such as interpreting content, preparing artwork changes and identifying potential quality issues—within established, deterministic workflows. Learn how Life Sciences organizations can use AI to reduce repetitive manual effort and improve efficiency while ensuring that qualified experts remain responsible for reviewing outputs and making every critical decision.
Jackie Leslie
Category Specialist - Life Sciences Esko
Chris Janczar
Brand - Product Offering Manager Esko
Pharmaceutical leaflets contain complex, frequently changing and often multilingual content that must be managed with exceptional accuracy. Manual formatting and repeated content entry can make the process slow and vulnerable to error. This session explores how leaflet templates and workflow automation can streamline leaflet creation, propagate approved changes and reduce repetitive production work—while maintaining the controls and review steps required for regulated communications.
See how a smarter onboarding experience turns customer requests into production-ready jobs faster — and sets the stage for a smoother, more consistent approval process. We'll explore how converters are moving away from reactive, email-driven coordination and replacing it with a structured workflow that gives every stakeholder clarity on what's needed, when, and from whom. The result is fewer errors, less rework, and a customer experience that builds trust from the very first interaction right through to final sign-off.
Paul Land
Lead, Product Management Esko
See how the synergy of a single source of truth viewer and GlobalVision-powered Assisted QA help your teams detecting issues faster and focus on the exceptions that matter most.
Frank Woltering
Senior Product Manager for Viewer Esko
Greg Inose
Product Manager Esko
Today's converters are expected to deliver more than packaging—they're expected to provide expertise that helps customers reduce costs, improve sustainability, and bring products to market faster. Discover how Esko's structural design, 3D visualization, and pallet optimization solutions enable converters to create packaging that's optimized for manufacturing, validate concepts earlier, improve logistics efficiency, and provide greater value to customers from concept through production. See how a connected design workflow helps reduce rework, streamline collaboration, and build lasting customer partnerships.
Susie Stitzel
Product Director Esko
New to flexo platemaking? We'll walk through the essential steps of the flexo platemaking process, explain the critical role plates play in print quality, and explore why flexo remains the technology of choice for packaging production. Learn how printers and brands benefit from consistent quality, efficiency, sustainability, and shelf impact, while gaining a solid understanding of the technologies that make modern flexo possible.
Rory Marsoun
Director, Global Flexo Print Excellence Esko
Explore the lessons learned over the past year, the realities brands and converters are facing on their PPWR journey, and the latest developments driving the move toward recyclable packaging. Discover how CDI Quartz is helping converters consistently achieve premium print quality on PPWR-compliant recyclable substrates while maintaining productivity and operational efficiency. Learn how future-ready platemaking technology is empowering packaging producers to meet compliance goals with confidence while maintaining maximum shelf impact.
Jan Mraz Richter
Senior Director Engineering Esko
What happens when plate preparation becomes simpler and more connected? Hear how a flexo converter streamlined workflows, improved consistency, and achieved higher print quality with less effort. Discover how Flexo Front End and Flexo Front End+ combine ripping, advanced screening, process control, and automation to deliver predictable results from design to plate.
Jan De Roeck
Director Industry Relations & Strategy Esko
Jan De Roeck
Director Industry Relations & Strategy Esko
Hear from a wide variety of Packaging & Industry Experts across the Globe
Paul has over 20 years experience in the Packaging industry. He originally studied Graphic Design, but quickly caught the packaging prepress bug. He has been working in most facets of the industry including artwork, repro and color retouching. He has a passion for simplification and automation.
Academically a fully qualified translator, Geert started back in 1994 as a software instructor at Barco Graphics followed by a 4-year period as a solution architect in Melbourne Australia. Upon his return to Belgium, Geert started a long journey in software product management being responsible for Rips, screening, color management, workflow automation and finally an 11 year stretch as Director of Software Product Management at Esko using his translations skills to “translate” customer stories into software requirements and innovations.
John Murphy, with a lifelong dedication to the print industry, brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the table. His extensive experience in workflow, imposition, and integration has made him a sought-after authority in the field.
Jan De Roeck, member of the Esko Corporate Marketing team, is highly respected and trusted for his insight in the graphic arts industry and his level of understanding of customer workflows and market requirements. He is a frequently asked speaker at industry events and represents Esko at different professional trade associations.
Based out of India, Balaji leads the global product strategy for Esko’s Graphic Editing portfolio, which includes ArtPro+, DeskPack, and PDF+ innovation. He works closely with converters, brand owners, and internal R&D to drive the transition from legacy editors to smart, future-ready workflows built on Native PDF. His focus is on solving real-world packaging challenges through scalable, standardized solutions.
Susie has more than 25 years of experience in the design, prepress, printing, and packaging industries. She’s also completely passionate about packaging – to the point that her family will no longer shop with her.
Rakesh leads product strategy and innovation in packaging and artwork management, shaping solutions that transform the way brands operate. He brings expertise in Mid-Market Packaging Tech, workflow automation, digital asset management, and advanced proofing systems.
Frank Woltering is Senior Product Manager for Viewer at Esko. Frank joined the packaging industry end of last millennium, starting his career in packaging production. Frank joined Esko in 2004 and is passionate about developing solutions that help packaging professionals collaborate more effectively, improve quality, and accelerate packaging workflows.
Jackie has 20 years of experience in labeling and artwork management solutions, from solution development, to consulting, and account management. Her focus is on identifying process improvement opportunities, sharing best practices, and recommending technology-based solutions to support getting products to market faster, increasing quality and reducing risk.
Gwen is a seasoned Head of Artwork Operations with over 20 years of experience in the Design-to-Print sector, gained through roles with both agencies and brand owners in the CPG industry.
She has a proven track record of driving value creation, delivering double-digit cost savings, accelerating speed to market, and strengthening supply chain resilience through process improvements, capability building, efficient vendor management, and technology advancements. In her current role at Esko, Gwen partners with CPG customers to refine processes and internal workflows to maximize ROI on technology investments, while also helping define the right metrics to measure success effectively.
Chris Janczar is Product Offering Manager for Brand & Premedia Solutions at Esko, shaping how the company’s platform capabilities are translated into customer-facing offerings for global brands and pre-media partners. He has over 20 years of experience in packaging and enterprise technology, with a background in product leadership and solution consulting focused on enabling scalable, outcome-driven workflows for CPG and Life Sciences organizations.
Dado Van Peteghem was born in the 80’s and grew up with a Gameboy in hand, sparking a lifelong passion for technology that he later turned into his profession. He studied Computer Sciences at the University of Ghent and has been helping organizations shape their digital innovation vision and strategy for over 15 years. Throughout his career, he has been involved with multiple international companies, startups, and advisory boards. Dado is the author of five business books on the rise of technology, a guest professor at business schools, and a public speaker on technology and leadership.
After completing her education as a typesetter and studying printing and packaging technology at the Bergische University of Applied Sciences Wuppertal, she began her career in international print management agencies. There, she managed well-known European brands at the interfaces of design implementation, artwork management, and packaging printing. With her move to Unilever in Rotterdam, she took on responsibility until July 2026 for global brands such as KNORR, DOVE, and SIGNAL in the Foods and Personal Care & Wellbeing categories. In the deodorant segment, she managed design implementation, artwork, and print management for the global brand REXONA/SURE.In doing so, she combines her extensive knowledge in design and printing technology with comprehensive experience in global processes for print, connected packaging, and supply chain.
James McMonigal is a PreSales Solution Consultant at Esko focused on helping packaging teams modernize collaboration and approval workflows through software solutions. He works with customers to improve visibility, reduce rework, and keep packaging projects moving smoothly from concept through production. With a background as a software developer and solution architect, James brings both technical depth and a practical understanding of how packaging workflows break down in the real world. He’s known for a clear, hands-on approach and a passion for making packaging processes easier for the people who run them every day.
Alexander Gruber is founder of QuarterPack GmbH and has enjoyed a successful career spanning several decades in the packaging sector since 1990. Following a varied career with manufacturers of flexible packaging and in the software industry, he carried out pioneering work in Switzerland as early as 2001 by setting up one of the first central reprographics companies in collaboration with an industry expert.
In addition to founding several companies in the packaging industry, he advises leading manufacturers, supports innovative research projects and also collaborates with Campus Wien University of Applied Sciences. He shared his in-depth technical and practical expertise, amongst other things, during a four-year teaching stint at HGBLuVA Vienna and continues to actively contribute this knowledge to various specialist committees in the packaging sector to this day.
Since 2013, he has been driving the expansion of QuarterPack GmbH and has established the company – and the group of companies – as an internationally respected partner for brand owners and packaging manufacturers, with a strong presence in the DACH region, Greece and Dubai.
Chris has been with Esko for more than 15 years, holding various positions, and is responsible for sales and marketing across the entire German-speaking region. With a particular focus on process management, he supports customers on their journey toward Industry 5.0 by bringing forward ideas that optimize their production processes through innovative, technology-driven solutions and make them fit for the future.
Jan serves as Senior Director Engineering at Esko, bringing extensive leadership experience in software and engineering development. Based in Germany, Jan leads global engineering initiatives that drive innovation across Esko's digital flexo solutions portfolio. Working closely with cross-functional teams, he helps translate industry needs into scalable technologies that enhance productivity, automation, and quality for packaging and print professionals. With a strong focus on engineering excellence and customer value, Jan is committed to advancing the digital transformation of the flexographic printing industry.
Rory is Global Director of Flexo Print Excellence, with 14+ years at the company in customer service, business development, and global account management. A Clemson University graduate in Graphic Communications and MBA holder, he also taught printing and packaging research at the university. An active FTA contributor for over 20 years, Rory is recognized for his expertise in prepress and plate-making technologies, helping flexo businesses adopt modern, automated workflows through innovation and education.
Uwe Dierking, 49, lives in Hamburg with his wife and two children. After completing his training in hotel management and a Franco-German business administration degree in Bremen and Marseille, he entered the world of design and branding through an internship at Landor in Paris.
He has now been working in the industry for more than 20 years. Following positions at Landor Paris and Lothar Böhm in Hamburg, he founded alvons design in 2012, an agency specialising in packaging design. Together with a team of five, he works with clients including Unilever, Homann, Bel Germany and Klinge Pharma. The philosophy behind alvons design is to combine the quality and expertise of a large agency with the flexibility and agility of a small, focused team.
Greg Inose brings more than 5 years of product management experience at GlobalVision, where he owns Verify and Verify API, the company’s latest generation of quality control and inspection tools. He works closely with converters' quality and prepress teams, helping them move faster with less manual inspection.
