From local restaurants to national chains, many use plain stock packaging for their catered meals. More food service companies are now realizing that custom catering packaging represents a powerful branding opportunity, though it also presents complex supply chain challenges. Here are two best practices for ensuring the successful use of custom catering packaging.
Catering Packaging Branding: More than Napkins
Think of who is at those breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings: staff, executives, customers, and partners – many of whom have a need to cater their own meetings. Are you putting your food in stock trays and delivering them in cardboard boxes from your vendors? By incorporating your branding on the packaging, you are advertising your brand to everyone in the room, every time.
Thus, you need a packaging partner with creative branding skills and the ability to produce it perfectly, every time (e.g. think color matching).
Custom Packaging Supply Chain Implications
With every opportunity comes a challenge. In this case, custom catering packaging puts additional responsibilities on you, your packaging partner and your supply chain to ensure that you never run out.
National restaurant chains need to produce catering packaging in the millions, manage delivery to all of their food service distribution partners and ensure that custom materials from corrugated to chip board and plastic trays are always in stock.
To do so, your packaging supply chain partner needs to have high volume printing capabilities, an ability to manage each distribution location and utilize safety stock and vendor relationships – and the experience to do all of the above effectively.
Choose an Experienced Partner
We’ve designed, produced and managed programs for many clients over the last 30 years, including McDonald’s, Fazoli’s and Oberweis.
We’re able to serve the complex and demanding requirements of national chains by producing custom catering packaging to scale, cost-effectively. This includes using print-to-mark, roll-to-roll to print in the millions rapidly.
We also manage the distribution to all of your partners. This includes working with food service distribution partners like Sysco. These programs require shipping separately throughout their decentralized distribution networks. We also produce small runs cost-effectively, such as ice cream party packs for Oberweis.
To ensure your custom packaging is always in stock, we maintain safety stocking levels at a centralized warehouse in the Chicagoland area. We also have work-in-process goods at our vendors. Though branding is important, managing the packaging supply chain and inventory is more closely tied to revenue and profitability, and is often more important.
A Holistic Approach
All of the above is yet another reason to consider TPH: to profit from our holistic approach to your supply chain, logistics expertise, creativity, and globally produced cost-effective custom packaging capabilities.
Contact us to learn more about custom catering and food service packaging today
