Any growing business needs to embrace new trends, and flexible packaging is one such solution that is becoming increasingly popular across industries. If you have a business, evaluating your product packaging choice is never a bad time. Without you even realising it, your packaging may significantly affect the efficiency of your expanding business. Outdated packaging solutions may cost you significantly more storage and shipping than necessary.
Flexible packaging, as the name implies, is used for goods whose packaging can be bent or folded. Bags and pouches are used in this kind of packaging. Consider food products like flour, salt, sugar, chips, etc. and notice how these are all flexibly packaged into bags and pouches without a set shape.
Challenges Faced By Growing Businesses
Growing businesses, especially those concerning food packaging supplies encounter several challenges as they progress as discussed below.
Need For More Storage Space
Your need for storage space will increase as your business expands. Due to the explosive growth in consumer demand, you'll need to expand your facilities to make room for more food packaging or other product supplies. In order to continue serving your clients' demands, you'll need to figure out how to use the space you already have available if you can't expand or relocate to accommodate your company's growth.
High Shipping Costs
As a growing business, you'll need to develop cost-effective techniques to transport and distribute your goods as you start to handle more orders. It's critical that you can effectively load your products during huge shipments so that you may pack the most items onto a single batch as feasible.
For example, though cardboard food containers are lightweight, replacing them with microwavable plastic pouches can be more efficient in terms of space efficiency. The better packaged your goods are, the lower your shipping costs.
Increased Product Weight
Product weight is another large contributor to your costs. Transporting heavier products will carry a heavier bill. If your products themselves are lightweight and you're finding that your shipping costs are growing faster than you can handle, the weight of your packaging may be the cause.
Finding A Scalable Packaging Option For Your Product Range
Your initial product line may need to be expanded due to your business's success and expansion to satisfy customer demand for more sizing options. Finding a form of packaging that can be readily scaled up and down while maintaining a cohesive aesthetic and consistent branding can be challenging.
Negative Environmental Impact
For expanding enterprises, environmental impact can be a critical problem. Your carbon footprint will likely increase as your order volume increases and your delivery area expands. While there is no way to restrict orders, there are packaging adjustments you can make to improve the speed and sustainability of your shipping.
How Flexible Packaging Addresses the Above Challenges
Here's how flexible packaging can serve as an effective solution to the challenges in food packaging supplies.
Lesser Storage Space
You can store more packaging in the available area by moving to flexible packaging that is simpler to flatten. Flattening allows you to store more packaging in a smaller space. Because containers like bottles, tubs, and jars cannot be compressed in any manner, this kind of rigid packaging may be taking up most of your available space. As your business expands, your space will become more congested and inefficient.
Lowers the Shipping Costs
Using flexible packaging can allow you to load far greater numbers of products onto a single shipment. Reducing the total number of shipments you need to send will reduce your shipping costs exponentially.
Does Not Affect the Product Weight
As your business expands, you'll probably find that your shipping costs increase if you use heavy, stiff packaging like metal cans and glass jars. Instead, you must consider utilising lightweight, flexible packaging, like bulk bags or transparent pouches. It will allow you to load products for delivery more effectively, and your packaging will be lighter.
Highly Scalable
Flexible packaging makes it simple to create a variety of container sizes, from tiny sachets to large bulk bags, allowing your product line to expand along with your company. Flexible packaging can be customised in size and material to balance the needs of both your customers and your products, whether you need clear pouches for visibility or aluminium pouches for protection.
Higher Efficiency
You can significantly reduce delivery emissions and the environmental impact of your expanding business by employing flexible pouch packaging that is lighter and more space-efficient than rigid packaging. Flexible packaging decreases the amount of food packing supplies needed, uses less energy to produce and transport, uses less water during production, and has a higher product-to-package ratio than other types of packaging.
Conclusion
Flexible packaging adds value and marketability to food and non-food products by combining the best aspects of plastic, film, paper, and aluminium foil to deliver a wide range of protective properties while using considerably less material. Today, flexible packaging has become one of the fastest-growing segments of the packaging industry. There has never been a better moment to move to flexible packaging thanks to its adaptability, customizability, resource-saving effectiveness, and sustainability.