Helping brands to minimize their freight expense is not only more sustainable but also can really actually help companies to save money. So what can food brands do to minimize freight costs and in particular how can they leverage their packaging to help them drive this savings is our mission is to better serve our clients. Yes, it’s a timely point. Obviously, we all know what’s going on in the freight world and it’s certainly not pretty right now. And when we think about freight, we think about outbound. How it’s going to go from either the manufacturer to the distribution center or from the manufacturer to the customer directly. But there’s also an issue going on with inbound freight that we can’t really overlook and someone who works in the major food corporations and packages a lot of food when the inbound materials and PET and others are coming in from East Asia and South Asia when the container prices go from 8,000 to 25,000. That’s impacting your costs and there’s really not a lot we can do with that. So what we can do now is to pay attention and do something creative to make the freight cost less.
1. Dimensional integrity reduces the space
Let’s just focus on when it goes from the manufacturer, either to a distribution center or to a customer, a couple of things that we work on. Number one is dimensional integrity. For the dimension of the package, we have seen countless cases and we have examples here, where the boxes are literally too big. It doesn’t need to be that big. Therefore when you put extra space in there, that reduces the number of units that you can fit on a pallet. It increases the cost per unit of the freight of the product during the freight process. So what we have done to try to focus on is really an engineering approach to the size that the package needed to be. And here what we’re talking about at this point is the corrugated part of it. How can we engineer to take up less space? We’re working on something right now–on reducing the height, reducing the corner dimensions, and making it so we can fit one more row if it allows it. So that’s number one working on the dimensions.
2. Re-positioning the air holes of the package to reduce the weight
Number two for products when they are very heavy. And it could conceivably weigh out the trailer before they cube out a trailer. We focus on engineering the package so we can use the least amount of raw material. The least weight of raw material to achieve the goal of the packaging. In the food business, we’ve done a lot of work in production, like taking out air holes. Taking out air holes, actually, in other perspectives, weaken the package and force you to use more paper. So we would look at things like re-positioning the air holes, wherein one package it’s here, another package is here. So if you try to mix a pallet you all of a sudden have misalignment of the airflow. So we try to focus on things like getting the right number of air holes, the right location, so we can then use added structure to basically take out a significant amount of weight, and that allows you to ship the package when it’s lighter both from manufacturer to distribution center and also from a D to C perspective. So if you can maximize and optimize the dimensions, the weight that helps you on lighting weights when you’re shipping D2C. So those things we need to know to better serve our clients. Yes, what we can do now is to have an engineering approach to the size of the package and re-positioning the air holes if your food package has the air holes.
