February 3, 2016
During the few days run-up from work to Christmas, I visited a local store that specialized in items from around the world. It’s a tradition my wife started—when we visited homes or had guests over during the festive season, we’d take our Christmas crackers, a traditional item for many in Europe. Looking around the store, I sighted packaging from Europe and England. What particularly caught my eye is that the packaging was “retail ready.”
Retail-ready packaging is the latest iteration in a solution created for European supermarkets. In the United Kingdom, there are four traditional supermarkets, and they are being shaken up by two upstarts called Aldi and Lidl. Supermarkets are under immense pressure to reduce costs; therefore, they tend to try and test solutions that have yet to make it here to the U.S. market or are just emerging.
One prevalent trend is retail-ready packaging, because it reduces cost in one of the most expensive areas of the supermarket—depalletizing and speed of placing product on the shelf. Retail-ready packaging is designed to reduce these two cost areas for the supermarkets directly. This is important, as I have no doubt Wal-Mart knows. Wal-Mart owns one of the four major supermarket brands—Asda. Therefore, Wal-Mart will be able to measure and have accurate data for these two points in both the United Kingdom and here in the United States, as well as in other markets.
A consequence of retail-ready packaging is that product must be fitted to the multipoint gluers line—a special two-piece or twin feeder. These feed the box and lid at the same time, allowing these to be packaged and palletized as one unit to go to the filling processes.
In using this type of packaging solution, depalletizing is faster due to the fact that all you have to do is unwrap the pallet from any protection, then transport it to the aisles. But the larger of the two benefits is seen at the aisle. Upon placing the product on the shelf, the team member simply removes the upper half of the package to reveal the lower item, together with the merchandise. There is no cutting of the boxes, no need to rip tape. In fact, the integrity of the brand message is sustained, because you can control the appearance of the packaging as it will be on the shelf.
Having the box in, effectively, two half sleeves allows the upper to be used as transit information and be of a much lower quality—saving cost. The lower half can then be a multicolored flexo job or litho printed.
With the increase of this as a solution in the supermarkets, multipoint gluers will now have to be fitted with twin feeders or two-piece feeders. This development will be difficult for some, as there may be insufficient space to incorporate this within the existing floor layout. For those that can incorporate a twin feeder, expect this type of solution to become much more prevalent in the marketplace sooner than later.
Les Pickering is co-founder of Quadrant 5 Consulting based in San Francisco. Les can be reached at 415-988-0000 or leslie.pickering@quadrant5c.com. Follow him and Quadrant 5 on Twitter at @Q5cLP.
