For beverage packaging, corrugated can play an essential role in brand marketing.
Whether you need multi-pack cartons, club store packaging, or retail displays, corrugated beverage packaging provides product protection, brand recognition opportunities, and cost savings possibilities. In a competitive market, driving sales, reducing costs, and cost avoidance are critical components of brand success. Using corrugated packaging for your beverages provides marketing real estate to drive sales while providing opportunities to minimize costs.
Types of Beverage Packaging
You’ve taken great care in selecting the ingredients and creating your beverage. The same care should go into ensuring it safely arrives at the retailer or club store and makes its way into your customer’s shopping cart. A variety of beverages, including wine, beer, sports drinks, fruit juices, soft drinks, and bottled water, can benefit from corrugated packaging. There are several types of packaging available.
Mother Cartons – Mother cartons are corrugated boxes that hold multiple six-, eight-, or twelve-pack containers. They offer sturdy construction that will support the weight of the beverages and protect them during transport.
Trays – Trays are lower-profile open corrugated containers used to hold canned beverages or bottled water. They can have roll sides for additional strength or cut-out handles for carrying.
Multi-Unit Box – These boxes are typically used to hold 12 or more individual bottles. For beer, for example, the corrugated board provides an alternative to folding cartons that offers more strength and protection for fragile items, such as glass bottles. When used to package wine bottles, corrugated is more economical than wooden crates.
Displays – Although not packaging, corrugated displays offer an opportunity for additional marketing of your beverages. Consumers are impulse shoppers by nature, and displays provide an opportunity for brands to present their products in an unexpected way and capture the consumer’s attention.
Beverage Packaging Is a Blank Canvas
A prime benefit of corrugated beverage packaging is that it acts as a blank canvas that allows you to tell your brand story, visually entice customers, and provide information about your product. The packaging offers a conduit for connecting with your customers to create trust.
Although beautiful graphics and vibrant colors may pull consumers in, don’t underestimate the power of your words. One online survey showed that 85 percent of respondents said product packaging helps them with in-store purchasing decisions. Unfortunately, many brands miss an opportunity – many said packaging doesn’t contain enough information, and 75% will put off the purchase until they can research the product further – this number climbs to 85% for millennials.
When creating the artwork for your beverage packaging, think about what is important to your customer for that specific beverage. Even if the information is on the bottle or can label, the consumer won’t have direct access to it if they buy a multi-unit box or mother carton. Information about the product, such as origin, organic, processes, allergens, GMO-free, etc., and your company, such as values, sustainability, mission, etc., are some elements that some consumers find helpful. Asking customers what is meaningful will ensure your packaging speaks directly to your ideal customer.
Text that is hard to read is not helpful. To get the most out of the corrugated packaging canvas, ensure fonts, font size, contrast, and print quality are suitable and provide clarity for your message.
Before submitting art files read, Five things Your Graphic Designer Needs You to Know.
Why The Printing Method Matters
Choosing the correct printing method is a key step in the development process for beverage packaging. The chosen method of printing can impact costs and the brand image. Selecting the wrong print method may leave you with packaging that you are not happy with.
Considerations for determining printing method include budget, run size, whether you want direct print on the corrugated or a lithographic label, the intricacy and detail of your artwork, and the type of finish required.
There are three types of custom packaging printing used for beverage packaging – flexographic, lithographic, and digital. Partnering with an experienced team will ensure you are using the best method or methods that won’t blow your budget but will allow your brand to capture your customers’ attention and go home with them.
Experience Excellence with Beverage Packaging
At Progress Container & Display, we are no strangers to providing high-quality, competitively priced beverage packaging. We have been in the packaging business for five decades, and we pride ourselves in continually investing in our equipment and processes to improve quality and efficiency. One example of this investment is our Gopfert HBL 8 color press, which can print inside and outside inline and offers the highest flexo print quality in the world!
With a solutions-oriented approach, we collaborate across departments and with our customer to ensure our customer gets precisely what they expect. Let us know what you need in beverage packaging, and we can create packaging you can be proud of.