Industrial packaging is the material used to transport and store a wide variety of products, from food and beverages to chemicals and hazardous waste. It’s often sturdy and designed to protect the contents from damage, ensuring that they arrive at their destination in perfect condition. This helps businesses maintain customer satisfaction, reduces costly returns and replacements and builds brand reputation. Efficient supply chain management is essential to business success, and industrial packaging plays a crucial role in this.
Industrial Packaging
Industrial shipping packages must meet rigorous specifications to ensure product safety and ease of transportation, handling and storage. Ideally, they must be strong enough to pass the Mullen and Edge Crush tests, have a large surface area to prevent spillage, and come in a size that allows truckers to load them easily. Additionally, they must also be lightweight and cost-effective to minimize shipping costs.
Despite these challenges, a robust packaging solution can make all the difference for an online business. It can increase impulse ecommerce purchases, communicate the company’s quality standards and help promote engagement across social media platforms. And of course, it must be eye-catching to attract potential customers and stand out on the shelves in retail stores.
A good choice for a brand-building package is a customized box with vivid full color printing that’s visible from every step of the journey. This increases brand recognition, especially among behind-the-scenes workers and customers who may not see the box directly. It can also help to prevent mishandling and contamination during the shipping process and eliminate mistakes, reducing costs for return shipment and damaged goods.
For a more environmentally friendly option, many businesses are choosing biodegradable plastic. This material is durable and flexible and comes in a wide range of sizes to fit different types of products. It can also be made to withstand moisture, which is important for some products that may come into contact with the weather during transit. It’s also recyclable, so it’s a great choice for companies who want to do their part to reduce the impact on the environment.
In the field of industrial packaging, there is a growing interest in the relationships between sustainability and circular economy. Research into the former has progressed faster than research into the latter, highlighting a need for greater focus on the interplay between the economic and environmental pillars of sustainable supply chains.
The most common methodologies in industrial packaging research are case studies, questionnaires and theoretical models. Almost 80% of the articles sampled use these techniques. However, the research on the supply chain efficiency and development processes shows a greater emphasis on explorative research with the potential for theory building, while the articles on environmental impact and regulatory compliance have a larger share of studies using qualitative methods. Future research on industrial packaging should include more dual-perspective analyses and a greater focus on reusing packaging as a strategy to increase circularity. This will be facilitated by the availability of new technology such as vision systems that can automatically check boxes for the right content before sealing.