Microwave packaging is surging beyond the frozen dinner, due to the confluence of changing American lifestyles and advancing packaging technology. In frozen foods, sales of products in microwave packaging will grow 4.4% annually to 2008, forecasts Packaging Strategies Inc.

Opportunities: Look beyond frozen dinners and consider “walk-around” foods and desktop “dining” for hand-held foods, potpies, breakfast foods, pasta, soup, and chili. Consumers want smaller servings and true value-added packaging features.

Approach: Develop structures and graphics that help harried consumers recapture lost time. What’s “hot” now? One technology is susceptors, where metalized film captures energy and produces heat to warm up the product (think Campbell’s Soup at Hand). Another tactic is microwave-only packaging such as bowl meals, which eliminates a preparation step.