Packaging is one of those costs that most businesses manage reactively. The supplier sends a price increase notice, someone negotiates a bit, and the new price gets accepted. Or they switch to the cheapest supplier and deal with quality problems. Neither approach is particularly effective.
Having spent years helping businesses look at packaging costs properly, here's where the real opportunities usually are.
Volume Consolidation
Most businesses buy packaging from multiple suppliers for different product lines, locations or categories. Each account is managed separately, so the total spend is fragmented and no single relationship has enough volume to attract serious commercial attention.
Consolidating packaging spend — even across two or three categories — with a single supplier increases your leverage. A supplier doing £50,000 of business with you has less reason to sharpen their pencil than one doing £150,000. This is obvious in principle but frequently left undone because the purchasing is distributed across different buyers or departments.
Start with a spend analysis: how much do you spend on packaging by category, and how many suppliers are you using? Most businesses are surprised by how fragmented this is.
Right-Sizing
I've covered this elsewhere, but it remains the most consistently high-impact change available to most businesses. Packaging that's too large for the product wastes:
- Raw material (you're paying for board that's structural waste)
- Void fill (to stop the product moving)
- Shipping cost (larger parcels cost more, especially with dimensional weight pricing)
- Storage space (oversized boxes occupy more pick-face)
- EPR fees (you're reporting and paying on more weight than you need)
A typical e-commerce operation right-sizing their packaging range can save 15–25% on total packaging and carrier costs combined.
Board Grade Optimisation
Over-specifying board grade is very common. It happens because buyers assume heavier is safer, because specifications haven't been reviewed in years, or because the original specification was set conservatively and nobody has ever questioned it.
Ask your corrugated supplier for BCT data on your current spec and the load calculations supporting that specification. If they can't provide them, that's informative. If the BCT is significantly higher than your actual stacking requirements (with appropriate humidity and time factors), there may be scope to move to a lighter grade.
The reverse — under-specification — also happens. If you're seeing damage claims or collapsed pallets, you may be specifying too light. In that case, investing in the right board grade eliminates damage costs that typically exceed the extra packaging cost.
Artwork and Print Efficiency
Printed packaging has higher minimum order quantities and longer lead times than plain. If you have branded boxes in several different sizes and variants, you're likely holding excess inventory of some and running into stock-outs on others.
Standardising your print approach — moving to a single box size with a peel-off label panel for variants, or using an inner branded tissue with plain outer boxes — can reduce both print inventory complexity and minimum order exposure.
Reviewing Supplier Contracts
Packaging supply contracts are often tacit rather than formal. You have a preferred supplier, you buy from them, and the price adjusts periodically. The terms are rarely stress-tested.
Common areas worth reviewing: lead time commitments and what happens if they're not met, quality standards and tolerance specifications, what happens to obsolete stock if you change a specification, and pricing review mechanisms. Having clear terms in writing tends to improve service quality as well as giving you recourse when problems occur.
Annual competitive tendering — even just quoting to one alternative supplier — ensures your primary supplier knows you have options.