Stackable Plastic Boxes Have Many Uses

If you run any sort of business where you manufacture or handle small products, you need to find a way to pack them, store them, and transport them. If you manufacture large articles – bicycles, for instance, or washing machines – they still need to be packed, stored, and transported but you can do that individually. Each item can be wrapped, loaded on to transport, and delivered to your end customer as an individual item. You can’t pack a lot of washing machines into a box.

Well, you can, actually. You could load a lot of washing machines into a bulk container if you were, say, shipping them overseas. But if you are delivering them to customers in the UK – retailers in this case – they won’t want a container load. They will probably only ever order half a dozen at a time because they don’t want their warehouse full of machines which will take months to sell. They haven’t got the storage space for that.

However, when you are dealing with smaller items that is precisely what you have to do. Pack them into a box for storage and transport. Handling them individually would be ludicrous. Of course, you might also pack them into a bag or sack, depending upon the type of item, but you still need to handle them en masse as opposed to individually.

This is where you have to make a decision about the most suitable form of packaging. In very many instances this will come down to boxes of one description or another.

Now there are two sorts of boxes – cardboard boxes which are designed for one use, and boxes made of more permanent materials which could be wood, plastic, metal, and so on. Cardboard boxes can be an ideal solution when you are making a one-off delivery. Your products could be something that your customer is only going to buy once, or perhaps only buy every couple of years, in which case supplying them in a cardboard box which the customer can then dispose of – hopefully by recycling – is probably the most cost-effective solution.

But it becomes a completely different ball game if you are supplying deliveries on a regular basis. Bread, for example. Companies such as Hovis and Warburtons deliver to bakery shops and supermarkets every day during the week, and they use plastic crates which are wheeled into the supermarket on a trolley, off-loaded, and the empties then taken back to base.

Not only that, they use stackable plastic boxes. They are ventilated boxes that stack one on top of another up to about five or six high on the trolleys. They get used time and again, and they don’t suffer from very much damage because the drivers handle them carefully. They offload a trolley first and then fill it with the stackable boxes full of loaves, trot it into the store – usually before opening hours – offload, wheel the trolley and empty boxes back on to the van, and then it’s off to the next store.

Each trolley is square and holds the boxes which can themselves hold perhaps 20 loaves of bread each. So the driver can deliver 100 loaves in the space of just a few minutes. It makes for considerable efficiency, but then you would expect the likes of Hovis and Warburtons to have got the hang of things by now.

If you manufacture – or even wholesale – products with a quick turnover that your customer is going to deliver on a regular basis, stackable boxes are the answer.

Depending on the type of product that you produce, you may be able to use nesting stackable plastic boxes. These have sloping sides so that when they are empty, they can nest into each other – and the big benefit is that it saves about 70% of space. It doesn’t really make any difference when they are on your van and the driver is bringing them back empty because the van is still in use. However, what it does do is save a lot of storage space in your factory, warehouse, or whatever, when the boxes are empty and not in use. Of course, it will depend on the type of product that you produce but is well worthwhile thinking about.

Caterbox is the leading UK supplier of boxes for the outside catering and event industry and can supply a wide range of stackable plastic boxes for any individual requirement.

Caterbox is the premier supplier of chinaware, glassware, stacking glass storage boxes and other general catering items to the equipment hire.