A national cosmetics supply producer was looking for a cost effective way of shipping their material nationally while maintaining the product temperature above freezing but below 18 C. To save on shipping costs, an on next day shipping method was preferable. Besides temperature requirements, and shipping cost considerations, the overall warehouse space needed for the packaging material was also a concern.
Traditional EPS molded coolers were the most obvious option, but the space required to house the EPS coolers would have taken too much of the warehouse area. To alleviate this, the end user would have needed to bring in smaller quantities of the EPS molded coolers more often leading to more working hours in the receiving process.
Proposal
Frontier Paper & Packaging worked with the end users needs to provide a cold chain solution that would work to meet all of the goals. We started to utilize our six panel EPS shippers with Thermal Shield liners to provide the EPS functionality without needing the storage space due to the store flat design of our panel carrier systems and Thermal Shield Liner. The 6-panel shipper system comes with the outer corrugated shipping container. Inside are 6 EPS panels combined with a snug fitting additional insulation layer of our 3-D Thermal Shield Liner.
Testing
To come up with an effective shipper option using the size gel packs the end user preferred, several different trial pack outs were designed and tested in our Certified Environmental Testing Chamber. All tests ran against an ISTA 7E summer temperature profile. In the process of conception, a new payload carton was designed to exactly fit the product packaging and keep the inner product packaging in optimal condition during shipment. Ultimately, we were able to come up with a practical option that kept storage space small, utilized the preferred size gel packs the end user wanted to keep for all shipments and meet the thermal requirements all while showing overall packaging cost savings and reduced shipping charges.
Results
Frontier Paper & Packaging was able to accommodate all goals of our end user by combining a six panel EPS shipper with our patented 3-D Thermal Shield liner. The test results gave our end user several different functional packs out options utilizing various combinations of frozen and refrigerated Nature Pak gel packs in varying quantities. Based on this data, the end user not only moved forward with our Cold Chain Solution but also utilized a new payload carton for their actual product container. Thus preventing the need to have the product loaded individually bagged to prevent any condensation issues on their product packaging. It also allowed our end user to package their product at controlled room temperatures without preconditioning their cosmetics before pack out.
A combination of several different steps allowed our end user to reduce associated costs by saving labor and space through all points of the pack out process. A larger quantity of product could be brought in with a smaller storage footprint. The same gel pack was utilized for all the packaging, so conditioning of the Nature Pak gels was consistent throughout their DC without the need to make sure that enough of multiple sizes of Nature Pak gels were conditioned promptly. Product no longer needed to be preconditioned for the shipping process saving another step in the pack out process, and 2-day shipping was able to be used instead of costlier overnight shipping options with their product was able to keep a temperature of above freezing but below 18C for a minimum of 48 hours.
