The steadily increasing demand for downgauging to reduce costs in packaging steel applications requires the development of high-strength packaging steel grades to meet strength requirements. At the same time, the demand for a simulative, computer-aided layout of industrial forming processes is growing to reduce costs in tool constructions for downgauging manners. As part of this work, different high-strength packaging steels were characterized for use in a finite element based process layout and validated using application-oriented experiments. Due to a low hardening rate and the occurrence of Lüders bands, high-strength packaging steels show a low amount of elongation in tensile tests, while for other stress states higher degrees of deformation are possible. Thus, common extrapolation methods fail to reproduce the flow curve of high-strength packaging steels. Therefore, a new approach to extrapolate the flow curve of high-strength packaging steels is presented using the tensile test and bulge test data together with a combined Swift–Voce hardening law. Furthermore, it is shown that the use of complex anisotropic yield locus models such as Yld2000-2d is necessary for high-strength packaging steels in order to be able to precisely simulate application-oriented loads in between plane strain and biaxial tension in validation experiments. Finally, the benefit of a material selection process for packaging steel applications guided by finite element simulations based on precisely characterized material behaviour is demonstrated.