What is Retail Ready Packaging?

As a manufacturer of advanced robotic packaging systems, Delkor has a unique perspective on retail-ready package design. Not only do we have to understand the needs of your customer, the retailer, but we also need to understand the technical requirements to produce those package styles. It is with that understanding that in 2015, we launched the Cabrio Case package to meet Walmart's growing retail-ready needs. After 30+ visits to Walmart's headquarters in Bentonville, we've established a solid understanding of their packaging requirements and we've built a program here at Delkor to assist our customers in meeting those needs.

Today, Cabrio Case is one of the most popular, economical, great-looking, and easy-to-open packages on the market and it's produced at a rate of 1 billion cases per year. In addition to Cabrio Case, Delkor offers case packing systems that produce club store-style stackable trays, tray shrink packaging, and customized die-cut trays such as those used by Aldi. We're going to dig into each of these formats in depth and we're going to talk about some of the latest trends that retailers are driving in retail-ready packaging.

Delkor's Cabrio Case is used by major brands across a wide range of retail categories. The Cabrio case offers perfect shelf presentation with its clean precut, front edge, and nicely finished and wrapped corners, it presents your product perfectly when on the shelf. In addition, these wrapped corners serve a second purpose, and that is to provide additional case integrity. It's common at the retailer for the stock person to grab the front of the tray to slide it on the shelf and by wrapping this front corner, we get excellent glue joint integrity. In the common tray, there are two minor flaps behind the display flap and when pulled, they can often break or fail on the shelf leaving your product with a less than ideal presentation. To optimize your shelf spacing at the retailer, Delkor’s case packing systems have the ability to overlap the products as much or as little as you desire in the tray to make sure that your facing works out perfectly for your shelf slot size.

To eliminate products from settling, the Cabrio Case is loaded with products laying flat and it ships with the product in that same lay flat orientation. When it arrives at the retailer, the case is turned upright, the hood is removed and it's placed on shelves for perfect presentation. For products that need to be shipped in an upright manner, we have designed variants of the case that can be palletized and distributed in that orientation as well, ensuring that we have the perfect solution for your product.

The common element between Delkor’s Cabrio Case and all of the other shipper styles that our case packing systems produce is that they minimize your packaging materials cost by using a single-piece blank. For blister packs or carded products that are converting from hang pegs to shelf-ready displays, it's important to ensure that these products remain upright when on the shelf. To assist with that, Delkor dots can be added to the Cabrio Case. Delkor Dots act like cleats gripping the sides and bottom of that blister pack or carded product to ensure that it remains upright on the shelf without tipping forward or sliding backward as a product is removed from the tray. For only a penny or two, this feature guarantees that your product is always perfectly presented.

For rigid containers and cartons, Delkor's tray packing systems offer an economical and flexible solution. With the capability to produce specialty trays such as those used by Aldi, our tray packing systems offer the same flexibility as our full case packing lines with quick changeover, taking just eight minutes or less. For large format seasonal and holiday trays as well as club store trays, Delkor's single-piece blank designs eliminate the need for multi-piece bliss tray formers and our versatile Trayfecta former can change between all tray styles in less than five minutes.

While retailers are almost continuously changing their packaging requirements, there's a clear trend of increasing the demands on shelf-ready packaging to improve the appearance, the functionality, and the areas of the store in which it's used. It's no longer enough to simply add a perforation to your current case and call it retail-ready packaging. Demands have increased dramatically on retail ready since it was introduced, and some are even calling this period retail ready 2.0. An example of these increasing demands is Walmart's project Gigaton and their carbon emission calculator.