The micro-enterprise trap: when your packaging supplier is the manufacturer

The rule: the brand is the manufacturer

PPWR, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, calls the company responsible for the packaging the manufacturer. If you have packaging, or a product in packaging, designed or made under your own name or trademark, you are the manufacturer (Article 3(1)(13)(a)). It does not matter that another company physically made the bottle or box, or that its mark also appears on it.

The manufacturer carries out the conformity assessment, prepares the technical documentation and signs the EU declaration of conformity (Article 15(2)). For supplement, cosmetics and food brands that outsource production, this means the obligation still sits with them.

The micro-enterprise exception

The Regulation carries one exception to this rule. If the company ordering packaging under its own brand is a micro-enterprise, and the supplier it buys the packaging from is based in the same member state, then the supplier, not the brand, is the manufacturer under PPWR (Article 3(1)(13)(b)).

A micro-enterprise is a company with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than EUR 2 million. The definition comes from Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, which the PPWR text itself refers to.

In practice this covers many small, one-person or few-person brands that buy ready-made bottles, jars or labels from a domestic supplier. If you meet both conditions, micro-enterprise status and a supplier in the same country, you are not formally the manufacturer of that packaging.

An inconsistency within the Regulation itself

This is where it gets complicated. The definition of manufacturer in Article 3 refers to a supplier "in the same member state". Two other places that refer to the same exception, Article 15(12) and the second subparagraph of Article 21, instead refer to a supplier established "in the Union", meaning any member state.

This is not a translation artefact. Other language versions carry the same inconsistency: "located in the same Member State" in the definition, and "located in the Union" in the other two provisions.

Until there is official guidance or a ruling that resolves this, it is safer to stick to the narrower, more restrictive reading from the definition: a supplier in the same country. If your packaging supplier is in a different EU country, do not assume the exception automatically covers you.

What the exception does not change

The exception only concerns the manufacturer role under PPWR: obligations tied to the packaging itself, its composition, technical documentation and declaration of conformity.

It does not touch your role as a producer under extended producer responsibility rules. That is a separate role with its own definition (Article 3(1)(15)), tied to registration, reporting and fees on packaging placed on the market, run through national systems such as Poland's BDO. Micro-enterprise status, and shifting the manufacturer role to your supplier, does not exempt you from those obligations.

The exception also does not apply when the packaging comes from outside the Union, for example from China or the UK. In that case responsibility for the packaging stays with the ordering brand, regardless of its size.

What this means for a small brand

If you are a micro-enterprise buying packaging domestically, your supplier formally has to hold the technical documentation and sign the declaration of conformity for that packaging.

That does not mean you can forget about it. First, you need to be able to show you genuinely meet the micro-enterprise definition, since that is what makes the exception apply. Second, get written confirmation from your supplier that it is taking on the manufacturer role for that specific item, not a vague assurance of "PPWR compliance". Third, once you outgrow micro-enterprise status, the manufacturer obligation reverts to you automatically.

What this means for a packaging producer

For a packaging producer selling to domestic micro-enterprises, this exception is easy to miss. The natural assumption is "I just make the packaging, the customer is responsible for it". With a micro-enterprise customer in the same country, it works the other way round: the packaging producer becomes the manufacturer under PPWR, and the obligation for technical documentation and the declaration of conformity falls on them.

In practice that means such a producer needs its own process: checking whether a given customer is a micro-enterprise, preparing technical documentation and declarations for the packaging it sells them, and tracking whether that status changes. It is extra work that is not usually priced into the packaging itself.