Packaging Materials - Basics, Paperboard & Corrugated Fiberboard Box Development, Part I

Hi Everyone,

This topic will cover development of corrugated fiberboard box (CFB).

Design of new CFB box is really exciting if you are doing it very first time & also makes us nervous when we think about fitment test, strength & most important transit test.

Personally speaking, I had faced lots of problem during my early days when resources and development time were very minimal. Today I am going to share you few points or key steps which needs to be considered while developing CFB box.

As  we know, there are various types of CFB boxes are available for examples, Regular slotted container (RSC), Central slotted container (CSC) etc. out of these RSC box is very common in the industry & especially in FMCG companies.

Let's assume we have to develop RSC box for a particular primary packaging like round bottle of weight 500 ml pack and it contains some oil/cosmetic/food products & market price is of X.

Following steps to be considered during development of box.

-Check with your marketing or sales team, how many pieces are required in a box and inform them about 20kg will be the maximum weight possible (considering easy manual handling). Often marketing team takes decision by considering overall cost of each finished box because one of the reason is if finished box cost is too high, sales team may find difficulty to sell and small distributor/retailer/shop keeper takes few pieces only instead of buying entire a box.

- Measure the dimensions of finished primary pack.

-So now we have primary pack dimensions & required quantity per box (provided by sales & marketing teams) and now we can develop box but wait what are we missing now???

-How do we keep packs inside a box ? Will it be standing or flat or side ways & what will be arrangement pattern ? Oh.

-So let's understand importance of orientation of packs & arrangement patterns. Consider if we need to pack 12 nos. of bottles into a box, so we need to understand what will be the best orientation which provides most optimize box. The orientation may be standing or flat or upside down, this has to be considered basis primary pack design & its type. Also orientation should not affect primary pack during complete operations, here we are considering standing position.

-Now we need to find arrangement pattern which is also vital to have completely optimize box. Considering 12 nos. of bottles to be placed inside box then following are the possible arrangements (Length X Breath X Height).

1.        12 X 1 X 1

2.       6 X 2 X 1

3.       6 X 1 X 2

4.       4 X 3 X 1  and so on.

-So out of these possible combination now we need to choose most optimize arrangement which consume less area & saves paper material but ensure that selected arrangement should not impact negatively on primary pack attributes during entire operations.

-Now we have primary pack dimensions, required quantity, orientation of primary pack & arrangement pattern, so finally we are ready to work/estimate box dimensions.

Part II coming soon, thank you.