The right manufacturing partner will help you come up with a packaging plan that suits your beverage. But it’s wise to think through primary packaging options (glass, plastic, cans, etc.) and secondary packaging options ( beforehand.
Secondary packaging is an often severely procrastinated (or forgotten altogether) decision in beverage manufacturing. Get it right and your product can move efficiently from the production line to retailer shelves. But get it wrong and you’re looking at damaged goods, rejected distributor orders, retailer compliance headaches, ballooning freight costs, or, in the worst cases, a complete restart of your go-to-market timeline.
At MetaBrand, we’ve helped hundreds of brands navigate this exact decision (and at a much earlier stage than why-didn’t-anyone-warn-me-about-this-sooner o’clock).
Our 25+ years of beverage formulation and manufacturing expertise makes us qualified to tell you that secondary packaging is one of those areas where a little education up front can save a massive amount of money later.
What Is Secondary Packaging, Exactly?
Secondary packaging isn’t the only piece of the beveraging packaging puzzle. There are actually three levels of packaging that will matter for your product, including:
- Primary packaging, or everything that directly touches the product. This includes the bottle (or the can, or the plastic, etc.), the cap, and the label.
- Secondary packaging, or everything that groups and bundles those primary units together. This includes things like 6-pack carriers, corrugated cases, shrink-wrapped trays, and more. It’s what makes the product shippable and storable.
- Tertiary packaging, or the pallet wrap and the pallet itself. This is what holds everything together for freight and warehouse operations so the product can make it to stores and actually be sold.
We’re focused on secondary packaging, which sits squarely in the middle of that chain. And it’s where a lot of brands can lose a lot of money if the options aren’t properly weighed before making the final decision.
Why Secondary Packaging Matters More Than You Think
Your secondary packaging directly affects your cost of goods, your freight rates, your distributor relationships, your retail compliance, and your consumer experience. All of it.
A poor secondary packaging decision doesn’t just look bad in the warehouse. It can:
- Cause products to arrive at a distributor damaged, triggering chargebacks or rejected deliveries
- Result in retailer delistings because your packaging doesn’t fit their shelving configuration
- Drive up freight costs because your cases aren’t dimensionally designed for standard pallets
- Force expensive manual labor on the production line if your format isn’t automation-compatible
- Blow your per-unit numbers if you chose a premium option before you have the volume to justify it
These problems happen, especially if secondary packaging is treated as an afterthought.
The Most Common Secondary Packaging Formats for Beverages
Different formats serve different purposes. Here’s an overview of the options and when each one makes sense.
Corrugated RSC (Regular Slotted Carton)
Corrugated RSC is a classic. An RSC is a standard four-flap cardboard shipping box. It’s widely used because it’s cost-effective, widely available, and universally understood by every warehouse and retailer in the country.
RSCs are great for protecting products in transit and are compatible with virtually every automated case-packing system. The downside is that they require more material per unit compared to some newer formats, and they aren’t always “retail-ready” out of the box, meaning someone at the store has to break them down before the product goes on the shelf.
If you’re early in your brand journey, RSCs are usually the safest, most accessible starting point.
Tray and Shrink (Tray/Shrink Wrap)
A corrugated tray forms the base, and a shrink film is applied around the products sitting in it. This format is common for multipacks of cans and bottles and is particularly popular for retail-ready packaging.
Tray/shrink packs use substantially less corrugate than traditional RSC formats, which often contributes to cost savings. They’re also cleaner on shelves and allow consumers to see the product before they buy it.
The catch is that you need the right equipment to properly run this format. And not all shrink films are created equal. A thinner film might save money on materials but lead to higher breakage rates in transit, which nets out as a loss.
Wraparound Cases
Instead of assembling a pre-made box, a wraparound case starts as a flat blank that folds and glues directly around the product. It uses less corrugate than an RSC and is tighter and more structurally sound.
Wraparounds are popular with higher-volume manufacturers and tend to run on automated equipment. They’re a smart choice when you’ve hit volume thresholds that make the machinery investment worthwhile.
Folding Carton Multipacks
These are the classic 6-pack, 12-pack, and 24-pack carton carriers you see in every grocery and convenience store. They come with a large, printable surface area, which is basically a billboard at the point of purchase, and they’re strong enough to be handled repeatedly by consumers and retail staff.
Folding cartons work well for glass bottles and cans and are available in basket carrier styles with handles or fully enclosed styles. They’re a consumer-facing format as much as a functional one, so design matters here.
Shrink-Only Bundles (No Tray)
For some products, especially aluminum cans going onto shelves where the cans are sold individually, shrink-only bundles without a tray or pad can be a most cost-effective option. Shrink film holds the units together as a stable group without the added structure of a corrugated base.
This format is lower cost per unit, but it offers less product protection than formats that include a tray. Shrink-only works best for shorter distribution chains where the product isn’t going to spend weeks bouncing around in a warehouse.
Paperboard Clip Carriers
With sustainability pressures growing across retail, paperboard clip carriers are gaining traction as a replacement for plastic ring carriers and shrink film. These clip-style carriers grip the rims or sides of cans, hold the group together, and are made from recyclable fiber-based materials.
They’re cleaner from a sustainability standpoint and increasingly required by major retailers and distributors as part of their sustainability commitments. If you’re targeting grocery and natural/specialty markets, it’s worth understanding what these accounts expect and prefer from your secondary packaging.
Automation Considerations for Your Secondary Packaging Line
When you’re planning your packaging format, you need to think about the equipment it takes to run that format, regardless of whether that’s happening at your own facility or your co-packer’s. Not all co-packers run all formats. And manual packaging, while flexible, does not scale.
The Problem with Manual Pack-Out
At small volumes, hand-packing can work. A crew manually places product into cases or trays, tapes them, and onto pallets they go. But it’s slow and it’s expensive per unit. More importantly, manual pack-out introduces inconsistency. Cases packed too loosely, tape applied unevenly — these inconsistencies can cause real problems during shipping and at retail receipt.
The bigger risk is that if your brand starts to scale and your co-packer’s line is manual, your cost of goods doesn’t come down the way you need it to. Now you’ve built a business on an economics model that only works at low volume.
What Automated Lines Actually Require
Automated secondary packaging equipment like case packers, tray formers, shrink wrappers, and multipack systems are designed around specific tolerances. The case dimensions, the container dimensions, the film characteristics, and the adhesive properties of the corrugated board all need to be within specifications for the equipment to run reliably.
This means your secondary packaging format needs to be confirmed early in the planning process, not retrofitted to whatever the co-packer happens to run. When MetaBrand works with clients on their pack-out configuration, we’re thinking about equipment compatibility from the start, because changing course mid-production is both painful and expensive.
The Changeover Problem
Many brands carry multiple SKUs for different flavors, sizes, and multipack options. Every time a production line changes from one format to another, there’s downtime. Equipment has to be adjusted, test runs need to be performed, and settings need to be confirmed. On automated lines, this changeover time is a real cost.
If you’re planning a multi-SKU launch, talk to your manufacturing partner early about changeover implications. The more you can standardize your secondary packaging across SKUs, the better your economics will be.
Tips for Getting Secondary Packaging Right
After years of working with brands across every stage of development, here’s what we’d tell you to do:
- Nail your retail and distribution targets first. Whether you’re targeting convenience, grocery, specialty, or DTC accounts, each has different expectations for secondary packaging format and compliance. Know what you’re aiming at before you design the pack.
- Standardize where you can. Multiple case sizes across your SKU lineup creates complexity in warehousing, ordering, and labeling. Where you can rationalize your secondary formats, do it.
- Don’t over-engineer early. Premium retail-ready packaging is great when your volume justifies it. Early in your brand lifecycle, getting a functional, compliant, cost-efficient pack that gets product to shelf is more important than a perfect unboxing experience.
- Prototype before you commit. Before you finalize a secondary packaging spec, get physical samples. Stack them. Ship one across the country in a real shipping box. Put it on a mock shelf. Problems that seem fine on paper become obvious the moment you have something in your hands.
- Talk to your co-packer early. Your manufacturing partner should be part of the secondary packaging conversation from the start. Our team at MetaBrand has an extensive network of secondary packaging manufacturers, so we’re helping clients think through these decisions before they become expensive problems.
How MetaBrand Approaches Secondary Packaging
At MetaBrand, we operate as a full-service partner, from beverage formulation to manufacturing to co-packing. This means we’re thinking about secondary packaging as an integrated part of the production plan.
Our facility in Edison, NJ supports flexible pack-out configurations, and we’ve built relationships with secondary packaging manufacturers and logistics partners that allow us to help clients think through format, material, automation, and freight all together. Whether you’re producing a pilot run or scaling, we work with you to make sure the packaging decision you make today doesn’t require expensive fixes six months from now.
Curious how this applies to your product? Talk to our team about your secondary packaging needs.
