Food and confectionery packaging

Five things to consider when choosing paperboard

To give you some food packaging inspiration, here are five things to keep in mind when picking the right paperboard for your food or confectionery packaging:

1. How it looks

If you’re selling beverages, mixes, cereals or confectionery, your product often competes with other brands in stores and online. That’s why food packaging boxes must have creative designs, distinct branding and shelf appeal. Visual impact makes the product stand out from the competition.

Because the food or confectionery packaging design is so important, you want the freedom to be creative – to design and embellish as you see fit. That requires a paperboard that can handle decorative techniques like embossing, foiling, debossing and folding.

Other important characteristics to look for when selecting cardboard boxes for food are whiteness, smoothness, and surface finish. The hygienic appeal and graphical presentation call for fresh fibres. A high print quality is required, with good contrast between the surface and the print, to achieve a good presentation of sharp half-tone illustrations and words which are easy to read. A stiff multi-ply paperboard is necessary to prevent cartons from bulging.

2. What it should do

The main purpose of custom food packaging is to protect the product. This includes protection from various physical hazards and environmental dangers during distribution, storage and handling at the point of sale. Some protective characteristics of the paperboard you should look for when selecting food packaging boxes are compression strength, toughness and folding endurance.

Preserving flavour and aroma is also vital for food packaging, as is protection from changes in the moisture content. There are several ways to incorporate flavour and moisture barriers in the package design, such as film overwrapping, sachets and bags.

Finally, the protection must last as long as required. Consumers often continue to use food and confectionery packaging as storage containers at home. This means the packaging must function and look good even when opened and closed repeatedly.

Select the packaging size and shape that best accommodates your product. Avoid oversized packaging as it may increase shipping costs and generate more waste. 

3. How it's manufactured

The best paperboard packaging for food companies requires the right raw material and a precise production process.

Important protective characteristics of paperboard include compression strength, toughness, and folding endurance. Good creasing and glueing properties ensure a strong carton. A smooth surface provides for ease of handling, good rub and abrasion resistance, thereby preserving the graphical presentation. The use of fresh fibres ensures durable creases on closure flaps and, together with approved coatings and additives, also helps preserve aroma and flavour.

Usually, the packages for beverages, mixes and cereals are rectangular in cross-section. They are often provided with the side seam glued, but can also be produced from flat blanks. Being high-volume products, they are packed mechanically, often at high speed. The packaging machines require low creasing resistance and, for side seam glued cartons, low carton opening force.

Product safety, where the product is packed in contact with, or in proximity to, the paperboard, is also achieved by using fresh fibres and validated by meeting internationally accepted safety standards, e.g., BGVV approval and EU Directives.

If you compromise on raw materials and manufacturing, you expose yourself to risk. Inferior paperboard can cause printing stoppages or limit what you can create with it. You almost always get stability problems, meaning your premium products look floppy on the shelves.

4. How sustainable is it

Sustainable cardboard food packaging and confectionery packaging are becoming ever more important. Consumers are increasingly considering the sustainability of a product, including its packaging. And regulatory changes are creating new demands.

To meet these demands, many food packaging suppliers are setting ambitious targets. This is a significant development, but it must cover a whole range of decisions. The raw material must come from sustainably managed forests. The energy used during manufacturing must be renewable. The finished product must be easy to recycle. Or decompose quickly if it ends up in nature. One example of a different type of target is the replacement of fossil-based packaging materials with biobased alternatives.

5. How it fits into your strategic supply chain

When you decide on paperboard for food packaging, you must ensure it will work within your total supply chain. And that covers every step, from manufacturing and transportation to warehousing and points of sale.

Today, premium brands invest considerable effort in building data and analytics capabilities, ensuring they have the right resources and program management in place to have a comprehensive supply chain, both at regional and global levels. That way, they can ensure that cardboard boxes for food are available where needed, from printing and packaging to reaching end consumers.