Edward L. Doheny
Chief Executive Officer & President at Sealed Air
Thank you, Brian, and thank you for joining our call. Today, we'll discuss our first quarter results, provide an update on Liquibox integration, our new corporate brand and our continuous journey to Reinvent SEE. After that, we'll open up the call for your questions. Starting with slide three, I'm excited to share that as part of our Reinvent journey, we are changing our corporate brand to SEE. Our new SEE brand brings clarity to our markets, customers and people of who we are, what we do and where we are going. We are a market-driven, customer-first solutions company. The new logo unites automation, digital and packaging, with the full circle representing SEE's Net Positive Circular Ecosystem and our purpose to make our world better than we find it. We enter a new phase in our journey to lead the industry by redefining what packaging does and can do. The new brand positions SEE as a world-class, high-quality growth company solving critical packaging challenges unlike anyone else.
Whenever our customers have a packaging issue or opportunity, we will be at the table in top of mind. Now moving to slide four. We'd like to share how we are creating high-quality growth. We break down our growth by geography, market, product and MySEE, our online digital platform. In the first quarter, our digital online sales grew to 14% of total company sales, representing a sequential increase from 5% in Q3 and 10% in Q4 of 2022. This rapid growth reflects the speed of our digital transformation and our ability to adapt to the changing needs of our customers. You can see our top 13 markets. We continue to reinvent the company from product-based to a market-driven, customer-first solutions company. The fastest-growing markets was Fluids and Liquids, which grew double digits in the quarter before counting Liquibox. With Liquibox, this market represents close to 10% of company sales in the quarter. Our Consumer Ready solutions are designed to meet the evolving needs of food processors, retailers and brand owners if they seek to respond to shifting consumer preferences and changing shopping patterns.
Through our innovative solutions, we integrate high-performance, sustainable materials, state-of-the-art trays and pouches and advanced automation technologies to deliver versatile packaging formats that can be tailored to a wide range of products. We leveraged digital packaging capabilities to enhance the overall impact and appeal of our customers' products. This vertical space represents one of our largest growth markets, with more than $10 billion in addressable opportunities. Drawing on our market-leading CRYOVAC material science and SEE automation expertise, we are able to expand our reach deeper into the proteins market encompassing fresh red meat, smoked and processed meats, poultry and seafood. Our capabilities also extend to other food markets, allowing us to offer an unparalleled level of flexibility and customization to our valued customers. We are driving continued innovation and growth in this space with our highly differentiated products and packaging solutions.
The next vertical, Fluids and Liquids, now representing 10% of our company sales, is our highest margin, fastest-growing product line. With CRYOVAC and Liquibox technologies converging, we are well positioned to capitalize on new opportunities in areas such as ready-to-drink liquids, consumer packaged goods, sauces and condiments, wine and spirits and many more. We're disrupting the rigid container market, providing customers with lower cost, higher value and more sustainable solutions. Our goal is to exceed $1 billion in revenue from this vertical by 2027. We are now driving internally to achieve this by 2025. The third growth vertical for us is our Automated Protective Solutions, which represents approximately 35% of our business today, focusing on a variety of markets and customers ranging from industrial to e-commerce fulfillment. I will describe shortly how we are working to broaden and optimize our existing portfolio while expanding market penetration. Now moving to slide five for visual depiction of a fully automated form fill-and-seal system that is currently being commissioned by one of our large wine customers, targeting the fast-growing $100 million wine and box market.
Compared with traditional bottling operations, our automated solution requires less than 1/10 of the footprint and half the cost. Our innovative bag-in-box solutions reduce waste and preserve the freshness of the product longer than any of the traditional packaging options without affecting its flavor or quality. This automated system combines our high-performance barrier CRYOVAC materials, fitment capabilities and our engineering expertise to bring the full solution into the box. Starting on the left of this slide, we show the critical process steps of the system, including bag forming, fitment attaching, wine filling and bag sealing. I'd like to highlight the fitment attachment process on the bottom left of the picture. Our engineers have developed a novel, high-speed method of attaching the fitment while the bag is being formed, eliminating leakage and oxygen content by avoiding punching a hole. Moving across the slide, you can see an automated box-making operation. The filled bags are placed in this digitally-printed fabricated box in a touchless process.
On the upper right corner, we show our end product in a restaurant environment where wine boxes are available for single-serve uses. The single pour of the wine from the bag enables extending the shelf life from hours to weeks, reducing waste and spoilage, which can represent over 30% of our restaurants' wine cost. This cutting-edge system solution, valued at $3 million, provides our customers with less than a three-year payback. This also represents the highest solution multiplier in our portfolio, exceeding 25 times. We are well positioned to drive widespread adoption of the system. By integrating SEE automation, CRYOVAC materials and Liquibox innovations, we are driving powerful synergies. Moving to slide six. We outline what we are doing to turn around our Automated Protective Solutions platform with an estimated addressable market of $15 billion. By leveraging SEE automation and our industry-leading materials, we solve our customers' pressing packaging challenges such as safety, labor and productivity.
Our portfolio of brand solutions include BUBBLE WRAP, Instapak, AUTOBAG, Auto Boxing, among others, is the widest in the industry. We're actively working to broaden our portfolio by bringing our total solution strategy across our platforms, aggressively expanding our fiber-based solutions as well as our equipment agnostic systems. This is opening new opportunities for customer engagement and growth. Our MySEE platform allows us to expand our customer reach into new segments while lowering our sales and service costs and making it easier to do business with us. Our online studios create new ways to interact with our customers, providing digital printing, packaging design and services. On slide seven, we can see a solution to a major challenge we were asked to fix by Continental and our 3PL partner, UPS. In the last quarter, we generated $2 million in revenue from an Auto Wrap tire packaging system, which addressed the issue of shipping individual tires with conveyable solutions for common carriers.
With this innovative tire packaging solution, we were able to eliminate safety concerns for the carrier to achieve a greater than fivefold improvement in throughput, reduced labor by 50% and create an entirely new revenue stream that was previously unattainable. Each individual tire is marked with an RFID mark, allowing for track and trace. The tires are wrapped in CRYOVAC technology film that is fully recyclable, highly durable and 65% wider than the previous packaging materials. This solution represents an opportunity to capture more than $50 million in the individual tire packaging market. Moving to slide eight, showing our SEE operating model. Fueled by Reinvent SEE 2.0, together with the Liquibox acquisition, our growth trajectory remains the same despite 2023's near-term recessionary challenges. For this year, we anticipated a very challenging first half. With the first quarter in line with our expectations, we continue to execute our plan to drive profitable growth in the second half of the year on the back of a broad market recovery.
In Q1, we completed the acquisition of Liquibox. Our traditional Fluids and Liquids business was up double-digit year-over-year in the first quarter. Liquibox is performing on track with expectations thus far, and we expect to realize the cost synergies laid out in our deal thesis. Reinvent SEE 2.0 cost reduction efforts are on track to reduce expenses in line with our $35 million to $45 million target within 12 to 18 months. SEE automation revenue continues to fuel our growth. Automation sales were up 5% in constant dollars for the quarter driven by automated protein solutions. We are on track to deliver more than $525 million sales for the year. In a tough quarter, Fluids and Automation continue to drive growth in a recessionary environment. Now, I'd like to turn it over to Dustin to review our financial results. But before I do that, I'd like to give him an official welcome and share that we're really excited to have Dustin on board. Dustin?
