Future research could be guided to propose other modeling approaches and solution methods that are better suited to production environments with a large scope of molded pulp products, able to generate feasible molding patterns and deal with production planning decisions without considering presets settings as problem inputs. Heuristic methods could be inspired by the structure of the model, which clearly presents blocks of constraints modeling the three key decisions of the problem: molding patterns generating, products lot sizing and scheduling. This structure might be used to make decisions hierarchically and separately, and in this way computationally easier to solve, keeping important information between the stages and avoiding unbalanced solutions. Other methods that might be also efficient to deal with large problem instances, with larger scope of products and longer planning horizons, would be solution approaches based on model reformulations and decompositions.