BY SUSAN K. LACEFIELD, EDITOR AT LARGE
PACKAGING
materialhandlingupdate
TEN YEARS AGO WHEN PACKAGING CONSULTANT TOM BLANCK WOULD
try to talk to people about the cost-savings potential hidden in packaging, he’d
receive a lukewarm reception. It was simply not seen as a high priority. But that all
began to change in the past five years. As transportation and warehousing costs rose,
companies realized that packaging offered a fresh opportunity to cut waste out of the
system, he says.
Despite that newfound awareness, many companies are still struggling to identify
where exactly they can cut costs in their packaging without creating bigger problems
down the line. A good place to start, say some experts, is with small incremental
changes that can add up to big results. Here are a few to consider.
1. Cut the size of your primary packaging. Sometimes, a small change to the
product’s primary packaging (what the consumer takes off the shelf) can result in a
big reduction in overall supply chain costs.
For example, Blanck and his crew of packaging engineers at the consulting firm
Chainalytics once helped a food company redesign the packaging for its frozen pizza
so that the box’s length and height were reduced by 1/16th of an inch and 3/8th of an
inch, respectively. “It was almost imperceptible to the consumer,” he remembers. But
that small decrease allowed the company to use a different size case, which in turn
allowed it to utilize the pallet better. These changes ultimately resulted in transportation cost savings of over $500,000 per year.
A quarter of an inch
here, a few more
items in a box there,
and suddenly you’ve
reaped thousands
of dollars in savings.
Here are a few small
packaging tweaks
that can produce
huge benefits.
Six small packaging changes
that can save big money
