With California’s Aug. 1 Individual Source Reduction Plan deadline fast approaching, consumer brands are under pressure to comply with SB 54, one of the most sweeping packaging regulations to impact the U.S. Companies must evaluate packaging changes, understand the financial and operational implications of those decisions, and prepare for annual reporting requirements that extend through 2032.
To learn more about these evolving regulations, the biggest compliance challenges companies are facing, the most common mistakes ahead of the deadline, and how businesses are balancing sustainability goals with cost and operational realities, The Packer recently connected with Alyssa Dizon, head of product for rePurpose Global, a company which says it just helped Tillamook save $100,000 in fees by reclassifying materials.
Under SB 54’s Individual Source Reduction Plan, companies have to outline a clear pathway to reduce single-use plastics. In the fresh produce sector, plastic packaging is often the primary defense against food waste and food safety issues. When your team builds compliance strategies for produce brands, how do you advise them to balance strict plastic-reduction mandates with the biological reality of maintaining produce shelf life and preventing shrink?
Dizon: The mistake we see is treating ‘reduce plastic’ as one instruction instead of a menu. SB 54 gives you five approved pathways to hit the 25% target, and elimination is only one of them. For a clamshell that’s genuinely doing a food-safety job — moisture barrier, bruise protection, pathogen control — the honest move is often right-sizing or a recyclable material swap, not removing the packaging altogether.
The real work is sorting your packaging into two piles: what’s carrying weight because of habit, and what’s carrying weight because shrink or contamination actually goes up without it. The first pile is where the easy reduction lives. The second pile still has to trend down over time, just through gauge, format, or material changes that don’t touch the function you’re protecting, not through elimination on a timeline biology won’t support.
The produce industry relies heavily on clear PET clamshells and multi-layer flexible plastics, which face intense scrutiny under California’s Covered Material Categories. Many growers are testing fiber-based alternatives, but these often struggle with moisture barrier issues in cold-chain storage. Based on the common mistakes you are seeing ahead of the Aug. 1 deadline, are produce brands moving too fast toward unproven alternative materials, and what should they be doing instead to map out a realistic 2032 timeline?
Some are, and it’s an understandable instinct: flexible plastics are heavily scrutinized under California’s Covered Material Categories, so fiber looks like the obvious escape hatch. The problem is that a fiber format that fails in cold-chain moisture and needs a plastic coating to survive shipping often lands in the same non-recyclable bucket as what it replaced, which means it may not generate real pathway credit either.
A realistic timeline treats 2032 as a staged target, not a single swap-out event. Test the alternative against your actual return and spoilage data before it goes anywhere near a commercial run, bank the reductions you can make in the immediate (right-sizing, mono-material formats, PCR where it’s APR-certified), and treat unproven materials as an R&D track running in parallel.
Your ISR Plan is a projection for the future based on the current data available, not an exact roadmap that you’re locked into. As such, you should incorporate realistic targets based on today’s available packaging, but in your plan you can describe enablement factors (e.g. specific component/material formats and feasibility requirements) that would enable you to reduce further. These inputs will help California’s Circular Action Alliance and Calrecycle make system investments that enable all producers to reach more aggressive reduction targets.
You’ve said that rePurpose Global helped Tillamook save $100,000 in fees simply by reclassifying their packaging materials. In produce, we have a massive mix of private-label packaging, co-packed commodities, and branded items. For a produce grower-packer-shipper or retailer looking at high potential compliance fees, what does a material reclassification actually look like in practice, and where are the hidden regulatory blind spots where they might be overpaying?
We recently helped Tillamook save $100,000 in EPR fees on their original Oregon filing through reclassification alone, and the pattern holds in produce: fee exposure can come down to how a component is named, not what it’s made of. A ‘tub’ logged as a ‘cup,’ or a laminate logged under the wrong resin code, can swing fees by real money per pound. Component count matters just as much as material type, so miscounting how many separable pieces are on a package (a clamshell, its label, its tear-strip) is its own quiet cost in California.
The produce-specific blind spot is ownership. Private-label, co-packed, and branded items don’t automatically share a reporting owner. As a rule, the brand on the package is the one responsible for EPR, even when a co-packer or retailer controls the actual packaging spec, and that mismatch is where obligations get missed rather than materials.
The final SB 54 text tightened the rules around federal preemption, stating that agricultural and food packaging can only be excluded from the law if there is a direct, mandatory conflict with a USDA or FDA rule. Given the produce industry’s strict food safety protocols (like FSMA 204 traceability and pathogen controls), how narrow is this window? Can produce brands realistically leverage food safety mandates to secure exemptions, or is that a regulatory dead end?
Narrow, and worth treating that way rather than as a likely out. The standard is a direct, mandatory conflict with a specific USDA or FDA rule, not ‘our food safety program is strict’ or ‘we follow FSMA traceability protocols.’ A strong food-safety practice isn’t the same thing as a federal mandate that specifically requires the packaging material or format SB 54 would otherwise restrict.
That’s not a dead end everywhere: if a specific material or format is genuinely required by an FDA or USDA rule, that’s worth documenting and raising. But it’s a case-by-case legal determination, not a category-wide exemption, and I’d treat ‘we’re food safety compliant’ and ‘we qualify for federal preemption’ as two separate questions with two separate answers. This isn’t legal advice; produce brands should work this through with their own counsel before assuming either way.
Produce is an inherently cross-border, fast-moving commodity — a field packed in Salinas, California today could be in Texas or New York tomorrow. Tracking and segmenting exact 2023 baseline supply data strictly for the California market is an administrative nightmare for grower-packer-shippers. How should mid-sized produce operations build data collection frameworks that satisfy CalRecycle without completely derailing their daily, fast-paced packing operations?
The reframe that helps most: your obligation follows where the product is sold, not where it’s grown or packed. A field packed in Salinas today and sold in Texas tomorrow only creates a California reporting obligation for the volume that actually lands in California, so the data problem is smaller than “track everything everywhere” once you build around destination, not origin.
For a mid-sized operation, that means a lightweight shipment-destination tag at the point you already record where product is going, not a parallel system layered on top of packing floor operations. Start with a documented, reasonable estimation methodology for the 2023 baseline rather than trying to reconstruct perfect SKU-by-state history on day one.
If necessary, you can use CAA’s approved apportionment methodology to estimate state-specific sales based on each state’s population relative to the population of all states you sell in. CAA’s own posture allows that baseline to be refined over time; it doesn’t require it to be perfect at first submission.
With the ISRP deadline hitting Aug. 1, many in the industry may be paralyzed trying to design a long-term packaging strategy. Because the Circular Action Alliance has signaled that good faith efforts and iteration are acceptable right now, what is the absolute minimum viable plan a produce brand needs to submit by Aug. 1 to ensure they are protected from non-compliance fines while they continue R&D?
Five things, at minimum: a submitted 2023 baseline report to CAA, projections for total plastic that will be used through 2031, pathway assignment for each major project packaging change, associated reduction calculations for each pathway for the target years of 2026, 2029, and 2031, and rationale for why (or why not) your brand will be able to contribute to California’s 25% collective reduction target.
What it doesn’t need is every material decision finalized or every fiber alternative validated. The ISR Plan is a forecast you’re sharing with CAA and CalRecycle to inform program plans and incentive design, not a locked engineering spec, so a well-reasoned plan with honest caveats about what’s still in R&D is a stronger submission than a polished-looking plan built on numbers nobody can actually explain. Given the exposure on the other side of getting this wrong, the plan that’s late or undocumented is the risk, not the plan that says, ‘here’s our reasoning, and here’s what we’re still testing.’
