The Best Packaging Solutions for Food and Drink Businesses

From lemonade bottles to biscuit tins and chocolate gift boxes, effective packaging is a key concern for businesses looking to ship their products by post. The perfect packaging for your products will prioritise preserving the freshness of your goods, ensuring they remain safe during transit, and enhancing your brand appeal. Read on to explore our best packaging solutions for food and drink businesses.

Prevalent Packaging Challenges for Food and Drink Businesses

Freshness

To keep perishable items fresh during transit, package them in a watertight cardboard box made from single or double walled corrugated cardboard, ideally lined with a layer of plastic wrap for extra protection. If the items need to remain at a low temperature, adding ice packs or gel packs to the box is an effective way to control the temperature inside the box during the item’s journey.

Damage

On top of using a sturdy, corrugated cardboard box to ship your items, the use of various cushioning materials such as bubble wrap, eco loose fill, and hexcel wrap can provide further protection by minimising the extent to which the items inside the box can be knocked about inside the box during transit, minimising damage.

Glass Protection

Always opt for corrugated cardboard boxes for shipping glass items, as they offer more strength and durability. Consider opting for a slightly larger box than necessary to make room for cushioning materials. For glass wine bottles, opt for cardboard wine boxes, since these boxes are specifically designed with the optimal protection of wine bottles in mind, and come in 6 and 12 bottle sizes for your convenience.

Wine Boxes

From breweries and vineyards to bespoke drinks producers, sourcing effective, reliable cardboard wine boxes is an essential step in delivering your wine to your customers in both an aesthetically pleasing and safe way.

A sturdy and reliable box will be important for ensuring your wine remains safe in transit. For the majority of businesses, 6 or 12 bottle boxes will be a great option, but even if you are shipping less than 6 bottles, you can still opt for this size box by placing your wine bottles in a diagonal pattern in the slots and filling the empty slots with packing materials such as eco loose fill or hexcel wrap.

If you are selling to consumers or selling wine that will be given as a gift, you may prefer to opt for a smaller box size to ensure your wine looks as presentable as possible upon arrival. In this case, consider packing your wine into a 3 bottle box or a bottle box sleeve and then packing this box into another regular, one compartment box. Be sure to fill the outer box with plenty of packing materials to ensure the inner box stays protected during transit.

Can Boxes

From pale ales and ciders to lemonades and cocktails, cans are a popular choice of drinks container. But when it comes to packaging your canned drinks and shipping them out to consumers, using a sturdy and secure form of packaging is imperative to ensuring your products arrive in perfect condition, ready to be enjoyed.

Can boxes are a versatile, effective choice, having been specifically designed to be used for safely transporting cans. Manufactured with single-wall corrugated cardboard and supplied flat-packed for easy storing, can boxes are a great way to enable a fast and efficient packing process for drink makers and other food and drink businesses.

Our can boxes are available in both a 12 and 24 can capacity, giving you options depending on the size of the order you are fulfilling. If you are looking to ship less than 12 cans at a time, consider placing the cans in a diagonal pattern in the slots of the box and using protective packaging, such as eco loose fill or hexcel wrap, to fill out the empty sections of the box. This will maximise the security of your drinks during transit.

Postal Boxes

When shipping bulkier food items, postal boxes are a protective and dependable packaging choice. Easy to use and made from recycled cardboard, postal boxes are an aesthetically pleasing and presentable way to ship items for your food and drinks business. Depending on the size of the items you’re shipping, you can choose the right size postal box to suit your delivery, ensuring a snug, well-protected fit, minimising movement, and reducing the risk of damage. Postal boxes are a versatile choice for online marketplace sellers due to being lightweight, cost effective, and offering the buyer a pleasant experience when opening the package.

If you are shipping smaller, flatter food items, letterbox boxes can be an excellent alternative to bulkier postal boxes, as these can cause delivery complications if the recipient isn’t at home to accept the delivery. If possible, consider ensuring your parcel can fit through a letter box so that your parcels can still be successfully delivered if the recipient isn’t home. Letterbox boxes are specifically designed for this, with dimensions that perfectly fit through a letterbox whilst still offering your product adequate protection from damage during transit.