From Cartons to Cost Savings: A Deep Dive into Co-Packing Procurement
How procurement drives smarter co-packing: A conversation with Tim
Strategic sourcing is about more than just finding the lowest price. In contract food packaging, smart procurement shapes the entire packaging process—from raw material selection to retailer compliance. In this episode of the Econo-Pak Podcast, Director of Procurement Tim joins Sarah to talk through how procurement supports scalable, efficient co-packing solutions.
Procurement’s role in scalable co-packing
Sarah: Welcome to the Econo-Pak Contract Food Packaging Podcast. I’m Sarah, and today, I’m here with our Director of Procurement, Tim.
Tim: Hi, Sarah. Thanks for having me on your show.
Sarah: Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about your background?
Tim: So I have a background in procurement and purchasing. I’ve worked for about 16 years in the supply chain world, mostly focusing on food, beverage, and nutraceuticals. Mostly understanding, you know, end-to-end supply chain with procurement and purchasing processes, vendor evaluation, just helping develop supply chain processes for different types of companies.
Sarah: Yeah, Tim has been absolutely instrumental in helping us with our procurement services. So we offer procurement for packaging, film, cartons. We can also do shipping supplies like pallets and also ingredients and seasoning. So Tim has been absolutely awesome for that in our sales process. So thank you, Tim.
Tim: Yeah, it’s definitely a great environment here, whether we’re helping existing customers manage their inventories, having conversations on their behalf with suppliers, providing turnkey processes for business process outsourcing, where we’ll manage the whole thing. We’ll vet suppliers, we’ll manage inventory. We’ll potentially put together a sustainability program for you based on materials. We’ll evaluate what type of packaging works best for your product, and also understand your type of distribution model, whether it’s ecommerce, or retail, wholesale, a combination of both. So we evaluate all that data and, you know, hopefully, you know, we put together a nice plan of materials based on your needs.
Evaluating materials for efficiency and savings
Sarah: Exactly. An example of that we have today, we had provided a pricing for procuring cartons for a project, and Tim brought some of these samples for us to look at today. Tim, would you mind just explaining to us the different types of packaging in just these cartons?
Tim: So yes, these are these are considered folding cartons. So essentially, we’re bidding on a big project here. And there’s a couple different variables within it. Here we have 25-point SUS board, and what that is, SUS and SBS, this is the bleached board. So a lot of, a lot of clients like this because it’s so brilliant as opposed to an unbleached board. And that also, you have to consider potentially, like going to a corrugated e-flute, that you can, you can wrap with litho and laminate. So this project was interesting because the initial ask was for an e-flute corrugated container outer shipper. However, it was overkill for the project. The materials that, it was a variety bundle of three items inside with a total weight of 10.5 ounces. So a lot of what we do is evaluate things like, okay, well, what’s the edge crush rating on the box, corrugated versus this, and you can get into a little bit of a value save by a price point.
Tim: So these two specific pieces here, this is what we call a machine glue top versus a tuck top auto bottom, the auto bottom automatically, you know, pops out going through the production process. You would need glue for this versus a tuck top. So this is a little bit more efficient, even though it uses an extra material of glue. So that’s something consider too when we think about the types of patching materials that match up with the type of production we’re doing with our equipment. You know, what makes more sense to run it more efficiently, based on the customer requirements. These are the two differences and we’ll go ahead and we’ll present some options to see what works best. A lot of times companies will do comparisons on shelf presence versus different competitive products. If they think that there’s an added feature on the packaging, they might investigate that because it’s really interesting, about 40% of people change their mind. In the store on the shelf, you know, they went there for a specific thing.
Tim: They’ll see a competitive product, about 40% of people will change their minds and purchase that competitive product based on the look and feel of the packaging, maybe potential sustainability claims, and shelf presence, right? Also, you know, how does it look against another product?
Fixed-cost procurement and packaging that works
Sarah: Yeah, that’s fascinating. And I think it’s amazing how you are able to provide feedback based on their initiatives and offer them that value added service of guiding them in the right direction and not only what is going to help consumers pick their product over somebody else’s product, but also save them money in the long run through efficiencies, and that’s all wrapped up as part of our fixed-cost pricing program.
Tim: When we started evaluating types of requirements based on when we have the initial conversations. One of them is, where is your package going to live? Are you really focused on your ecommerce business where you can create your own visual environment, on your website, or you know, is this on a bigger like wholesale website or are you in retail, wholesale? On those type of things. So once we understand those, like what’s driving some of the marketing, and obviously, we’re really interested in food safety. A lot of the materials we put together and some of our structure, some of our barrier formulations on our flexographic packaging are very specific to the types of products that we help customers figure out the best solution to. And some of that is, we’re concerned with extended producer responsibility. And we’re kind of helping guide a lot of our clients to that, as states start to adopt a lot of those regulation into their packaging choices.
Sarah: Yes. So it’s very forward thinking, making sure that we’re not only handling the regulations that exist today, but also the regulations that will potentially exist in the next decade to come.
Tim: Yeah. Because it’s kind of like a peace of mind, you know, based on requirements and we’ll give recommendations on what we think. But we’re very materials, at least, in the procurement team, you know, we can get very specific on what types of materials we think are best for the product, but also sustainability in the future is… What will happen in the future, is third-party… Third parties will start auditing, you know, types. And this is already happening in the distribution level as far as, like, some big box stores and wholesale as far as Costco, they want to know even what type of dunnage. So what type of pallet materials you are, you know, sending into the distribution centers, and they want to make sure that, you know, you’re following the requirements, which, you know, they have some sustainability requirements built in. So we’re very aware of that. We work with many different types of distribution models and specific retailers. So we can guide people into making those choices.
Forecasting and sourcing beyond packaging
Sarah: That’s awesome. And again, I mean, that is all wrapped up into one price for our co-packing solutions. So contract food packaging, typically, for other co-packers, it’s variable pricing. It changes from project to project, month to month. When you’re with us, it’s fixed-cost pricing, so you get one cost for your project, your PO, and that includes everything that Tim was talking about, to our efficiencies, to your product and your packaging, and we can even work to save you money on the pricing that we provided for you initially. So just a really awesome service.
Tim: Outside the scope of our packaging formulations, we procure a lot of raw materials. For the actual production. We are constantly in a, I would say, in a zone of diversification and optimization. Basically, we’re always we have a preferred supplier network that we work with. But we are constantly talking to new suppliers and we’re constantly running vendor score cards on our existing relationships to see how those relationships can be better. How can we optimize them and we’re always kind of going through that whole process of vetting. And you know, why we like to do that is we can take advantage of a lot of, a lot of our buying power when we do that. But also we’ll bring in a new supplier specific for our clients needs. That makes sense. So we’re constantly talking to suppliers and negotiating and we’re also very aware of the commodities market.
Tim: We do a lot of advanced forecasting to know that, you know, raw materials, especially in the packaging world as well. We were in a good position. We understood what the corrugated market was going to do early in January, we knew there was going to be cost increases because of labor and raw materials. We were able to allocate ahead of time to mitigate some of those cost increases. So, that’s what we do, and we’re constantly developing new relationships based on requirements and needs of our clients.
Sarah: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Tim, and explaining all the amazing work you do for Econo-Pak. And yeah, can’t wait to chat with you next time.
Tim: Thanks, Sarah.
Strategic sourcing that supports growth-ready packaging
From forecasting and supplier vetting to packaging optimization and sustainability, Tim’s procurement insights are a key part of what makes Econo-Pak’s co-packing solutions so effective. If you’re looking for a turnkey partner that handles the details—without surprise fees—learn more at www.econo-pak.com.
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