“Cooling and the distance to deliver the final product to the supermarket, are examples of important factors,” Johan says. “For a product that’s packaged under very humid conditions and that has to be transported far away afterwards, you need a different packaging than for a product that is only in cooling for one night, and in stores the next day after a 20 km journey.” Sometimes packagings travel for 3 weeks. Limes or mangoes are packaged in Mexico or Brazil, after which they travel for 3 weeks by shipping container to Europe. “For overseas transport, we developed a thinner carton, for instance,” Johan says. “Over there, thick corrugated cardboard boxes are used very often. These have to be folded over or folded up in South or Central America by the client, which usually causes you to end up with a cardboard thickness of more than three centimetres on each side. If you then put a lid on top of that, you easily lose 6 cm, per box side, in a container.”
Smart Packaging Solutions has developed an innovative packaging for this, with the corner of the construction being adjusted, and better fibres being used to make the box thinner and stronger. “That way you respond to the cost price, but also to optimization of the container cost. More boxes in one container also lowers the number of shipments, and that way you’re doing business in an environmentally conscious manner.”
Savings thanks to packaging
The boxes consist entirely of recycled materials. “We try to think along with our clients, and we see demand from the market is increasing. We’re taking a broader view as well. The price aspect of packaging alone is too narrow.” That means Smart Packaging Solutions looks at how high the boxes in a truck can be loaded, for instance. One example from Spain shows that, thanks to an adjustment in the box construction, two additional layers per pallet could fit in a truck. This caused a cherry tomato company savings of ten percent in transport costs per truck. “That’s a significant saving, especially when you consider that this company sends 50 shipments to Eastern Europe every week.”
Another example is a specific tomato tray, which is shipped to Scandinavia. “In this tomato tray, a very high quality tomato is packaged, and the demands of the end customers are very high. For this tomato packaging, we used a higher grammage as well as better quality paper fibres than for a tomato box in which tomatoes are packaged today that are delivered to the end customer in Germany at 6 o’clock in the morning. The result has to be the same in both cases, particularly when it comes to the delivery of a perfect packaging.”
Another trend Johan sees, is the information on the packagings. Problems in the food chain encourage companies to clearly use the box as a source of information. Important information is printed onto the boxes. “At Smart Packaging Solutions, we guarantee full traceability, by the way. For every cardboard sheet, we know the paper roll it is made from. At the moment when we process this sheet into a finished product, we know by whom, where and when exactly the production process took place.”
More information:
Smart Packaging Solutions
Johan de Neef
www.smart-packaging-solutions.com
Johan.de.neef@smartpaso.com