How to Cut Down Food Packaging Cost for Restaurants

You are looking for food packaging for your restaurant. You’ve done some research and found out that there are many different types of packaging. Your choice was therefore 100% customised and personalised packaging. Indeed it is an absolutely effective way to promote your restaurant as we saw in the article “How to improve your brand through food packaging“. If you haven’t read it yet, I advise you to read it. We will have all the information in order to really understand the advantages of having a personalized packaging that reflects the image of your restaurant. But unfortunately this type of packaging has a cost. But don’t panic, small budgets can also afford this kind of packaging. We will see together in the rest of this article how to optimize your food packaging cost in order to offer these packagings at the lowest price.

Lower gsm

First of all, we have seen that we can use multiple types of paper for paper food packaging. These differ in terms of their thickness, for example. Indeed, the higher the gsm of the paper, the thicker the paper will be and therefore more resistant. However, the price of paper also varies according to the value of the gsm. The higher the gsm number, the higher the price of the raw material.
Some packaging requires the use of paper with a high gsm but not necessarily. So you’ll have to think carefully about the type of paper you can use. By being well advised and by choosing the minimum gsm for your packaging you will have at the same time a resistant packaging according to the constraints of your food. But you will also be able to make big savings in relation to the raw material used.

No coating

Still in the field of paper used, there are papers with different types of coating. Depending on the food you serve, a paper with a specific coating may be necessary. For example, if you serve food with sauce, PE coated paper must be used to prevent leaks. Some coatings are used for the external part of the packaging for purely aesthetic reasons, such as clay coating for example. This type of coating can be dispensed with if you want to reduce the cost of your packaging. Because indeed a raw paper will necessarily be less expensive than a paper with a coating. Of course your packaging will be a little less appealing than if you had used a coated paper but the savings you will make will not be negligible.

ALternatives (sleeves and stickers)

Customizing packaging from A to Z can be very expensive. Especially when it comes to printing your design in colour on the entire surface of the paper used. The price per unit can increase very quickly for packaging with printing. But don’t worry, there are other alternatives. Instead of printing on the entire surface of the paper, we can help you customize sleeves or stickers to be placed around or on your packaging. This alternative allows you to drastically reduce the cost of food packaging while keeping the personalisation that is essential to promote your brand.

Smaller size

Finally, you can optimize the size of your packaging. Paper packaging is cut from large sheets of paper or from rolls of paper. But cutting also means waste. Sometimes with a certain size of packaging you will only have room to cut one packaging on the sheet of paper, whereas if you reduce the size by just 1cm you will be able to cut two on the same paper. So try to check with your supplier to see what is the perfect size to use to meet both your requirements and the lowest possible cost.

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