Most products sold are packaged for shipping and additionally, for items sold through retail outlets, for presentation within a retail setting. All that packaging uses a lot of material and sophisticated machinery is used to actually do the packaging. The machines used to do the packaging—be that bottling, canning, labeling or wrapping—are what we look at in today’s market size post.

Today’s market size is the value of all shipments by U.S. manufacturers of packaging machinery in 2009. The graphic presents data on this industry’s shipments over the past decade and shows a pattern that bucks the trend seen in most U.S. manufacturing industries.

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2009
Market size: $4.13 billion
Source: “Sector 31: Annual Survey of Manufactures: General Statistics: Statistics for Industry Groups and Industries: 2009 and 2008,” 2009 Annual Survey of Manufactures, NAICS Industry 333993, data released on December 3, 2010, available online here. Data used to produce the graph come from a series of Census Bureau reports that have been combined with other industry data and presented with a long historical perspective in a work edited by Joyce P. Simkin titled Manufacturing & Distribution USA, Sixth Edition, published by Gale—Cengage Learning in 2011, Volume 2, page 1115.
Original source: U.S. Bureau of the Census