Packaging Optimization: Ditching Round Pizzas
November 01, 2016
When your brand to be the “budget option” (which is a fancy way of saying the cheapest guy on the block), you have to squeeze out profit everywhere you can. In many cases, this means optimizing your packaging for maximum cost effectiveness.
Totino’s Party Pizza brand recently completed a packaging overhaul that was designed to fit more product on a pallet as a means to reduce shipping costs of its frozen pizzas. The answer? To ditch the round pizza in favor of a space-maximizing square one.
“Years ago the Walmart Scorecard began to evaluate the “selling unit cube utilization” (SUCU, for short). This SUCU metric looked at the ratio of how well the product fit inside its respective packaging (product volume vs. package volume). When you evaluate the amount of air space and the cubic utilization of a round pizza in a square box, this shape change seems like a no-brainer. And in the transportation and warehousing world (not to mention cold-chain transportation and storage), this space comes at a premium cost.”
Or to put it another way, more pizzas per pallet means fewer pallets, less cold-chain warehousing, fewer trucks and reduced labor. The results were pretty astounding too: a 15% increase in pizzas per pallet means 42,000 fewer pallets being shipped and 700 fewer trailers on the road.
This might be the greatest innovation since the pizza box! Or, at least the “Pizza Pizza Box.” And it all has to do with understanding how packaging size and shape impacts the supply chain. That’s where we can help!
Let our operational team enhance your process optimization, inventory solutions, logistical reports and package testing. Understanding how to power up your pallet game is something we just get, like our whole-package approach white paper to retail store displays.
Fall in love with The Ernest Way and give us a call today to learn how we can help. We’re ready to find innovative ways to make your packaging ops.
