The strawberry: lunchbox staple, shortcake essential, beloved by just about everyone.
But getting one from the field to the table in perfect condition is harder than it looks.
In the produce industry, the clock starts the moment something is picked. In Florida, for example, a strawberry is picked, chilled, and shipped within 24 hours. Every hour it spends warm reduces its shelf life. And the packaging it’s in has to keep up.
At the same time, growers are working through very tough cost conditions. Labor is harder to find and more expensive, especially for crops like strawberries and tomatoes that are still largely picked by hand. Fertilizer, plants, plastic, and fuel costs have all climbed.
That’s why more growers are asking whether a machine could do what a person does today, from packing clamshells into boxes to building pallets for the field.
And it’s why every dollar a packaging partner can take out of the operation matters.
In such economic conditions, it makes sense to scrutinize the box price. It’s visible, concrete, and easy to compare. But that number tells you comparatively little about what a box actually costs you.
What a box really costs comes down to reliability, and in produce, reliability has two halves. One: The box has to perform — cool the fruit fast, hold its strength in a wet field, carry a full pallet all the way to market. And two: The box has to be there on time and in the volume you need, even when the season peaks.
Get both halves right, and the same box that protects your crop can take cost out of your operation.
Here’s what to look for — and what to ask any packaging partner — before your next season.
Where packaging puts produce at risk
For strawberries especially, the faster the fruit cools after picking, the better the quality and the longer the shelf life. That makes cooling one of the most important jobs a strawberry box does — and one of the most overlooked.
When a grower loads 8 to 12 pallets into a pre-cooler, it can take one to two hours to bring the fruit down to temperature. The venting in the bottom and ends of the box determines how quickly cold air can reach the produce.
We’ve designed venting that can cut 15 to 30 minutes off that cooling time, which can mean an extra day or two of quality for the fruit. It can also be the difference between a truck that's accepted and one that's rejected.
That difference is expensive.
Some math: A truckload of strawberries carries 28 pallets. Each pallet holds 120 boxes, with eight clamshells to a box. If that truck gets rejected because the quality isn’t right or a box fails, the grower can be looking at a loss of $50,000 – $100,000 or more.
… On one truck.
The box also has to stay strong when it gets wet. In Florida, strawberry picking runs heavily through December, January, and February, when mornings can be so dewy it almost feels like rain. Pickers carry boxes up and down the rows, and by the time pallets are stacked, the outsides can be noticeably soaked.
A box that can't handle moisture to that degree becomes weak. Pallets lean, boxes crush, and the fruit inside gets damaged before it can even reach the cooler.
What it takes for a box to perform in wet and cold conditions
"Moisture resistant" only means so much on a spec sheet. What matters is whether the box holds its strength through the conditions it will actually meet, from a wet field to a cold pre-cooler to the truck, all while carrying the weight of a loaded pallet.
In Florida, nearly all of our strawberry and tomato packaging uses °ä±ô¾±³¾²¹³§³ó¾±±ð±ô»å®, 91°µÍø's proprietary and sustainable wax-alternative coating. It helps keep moisture from breaking down the paper so the box can hold its strength through dewy picking, the pre-cooler and the trip to market. When a wet box dries out in the cooler, it gets its strength back.
One of our beverage customers put that moisture resistance to a real-world test.
While bidding out its tray business, it loaded pallets of milk cartons into a refrigerated truck and opened the doors every hour from morning to mid-afternoon, mimicking a day of school deliveries. By afternoon, every competing tray's pallet was leaning against the truck wall.
Ours was still standing.
The customer stayed with us because the tray performed.
The same principle applies in produce: don't just ask whether a box is designed for moisture. Ask how it's been tested — and whether those tests resemble your operation.
That's especially important if you're considering an alternative to wax-coated corrugated packaging. Wax provides moisture protection, but wax-coated boxes typically can't enter the normal corrugated recycling stream and can add cost. °ä±ô¾±³¾²¹³§³ó¾±±ð±ô»å® addresses both.
But not every recyclable alternative performs the same way in very wet conditions. So: Test before you switch.
When a cheaper box costs more
Growers want and deserve a fair price for packaging. But some of the biggest savings happen beyond the price of the box.
That’s the thinking behind what we call Total Cost of Corrugated Ownership (TCCO), the principle that guides our work with customers. Instead of stopping at the price of a box, TCCO looks at the full cost of packaging across your operation, including packing efficiency, storage, transportation, product damage and waste, to show where better packaging can deliver more overall value.
One Florida strawberry grower saw those savings firsthand. He'd been with another supplier for about eight years, and his costs kept rising, so he asked us for ideas.
We showed him how a different box could cool faster and reduce risk, how stacking tabs could eliminate a tie sheet from every pallet, and how the design could fit more boxes on every truck, which means fewer deliveries.
None of those savings came from cutting the price of the box. They came from looking at what the box touched throughout his operation.
This will be his first season with 91°µÍø.
Keeping supply moving through peak season
Performance is only half of reliability. The other half is making sure the box is there when you need it.
Florida’s produce season typically runs from November into March or April. In those five or six months, growers pack what most businesses ship in a full year. At peak, a single strawberry grower can pick 30,000 to 100,000 flats a day. A truckload of our flat, unassembled boxes holds about 39,600, compared with about 30,000 from a competitor. Even so, a grower at peak can go through more than two of our truckloads in a single day.
No plant can make all of that in real time, so reliability has to be planned months in advance. We start running boxes for the season in July. By October, those pre-runs can cover more than 40 percent of a season's volume, stored at the customer's site and in our own warehouse.
Planning continues through the season. Growers share regular forecasts on picking, yields and pack-out, and we hold weekly calls on paper, volume and weather to keep supply on pace. We also build in backup. Two of our three Florida plants can back each other up on produce packaging, which matters in a state where storms are part of the plan.
The same goes for equipment. Our box-forming machines sit at customers' facilities, and from December through March, our dedicated mechanical packaging technicians are out seven days a week to keep lines running.
During peak season, the best box in the world doesn't help if it isn't there.
The questions produce buyers should ask before next season
Every grower is putting their livelihood into a box and trusting it to get from point A to point B. Before your next season, ask the questions that reveal how much a packaging supplier really understands about your operation:
- What's your history of performance in my crop?
- How will you help my product cool faster, stack stronger and hold up to moisture?
- Where can you take cost out of my operation beyond the price of the box?
- How will you make sure I have packaging when my season peaks?
That strawberry we started with has a long way to go before it reaches a lunchbox or a shortcake. It has to get out of the field, cool quickly, survive the trip and arrive in the condition someone expects.
A vendor provides a product and a price. A partner makes sure the box is ready for every step of that trip.
And when the box does its job well, nobody eating the strawberry ever has to think about it.
If you’re interested in talking through how the right packaging partner could make a big difference next season, get in touch with us at CustomerCareTeam@ipaper.com.