Companies have choice over how they package their products, and have a number of levers to change behavior: they might reduce the extent to which they provide packaging (does that single piece of fruit need to be wrapped in plastic?), or offer incentives to customers to provide their own packaging (eg cups at coffee shops), or might provide incentives for packaging to be returned instead of trashed (deposits on cans and bottles).

And at the end of all that, if a company still produces products that we know will probably end as packaging litter... hell yeah, charge them (and implicitly the littering consumers) for that negative externality.

Agree with it or not, this is already normal practice. San Francisco has a "Cigarette Litter Abatement Fee" of $0.85 per pack.

https://sftreasurer.org/cigarette