A crate fleet is compared against the carton invoice, and on that comparison it often looks expensive. The carton invoice is one line on a purchase ledger and it is easy to find. The other costs of running cartons are spread across labour, waste and the odd emergency, and nobody has ever added them up in the same place.
The four costs that move
Purchase, which is the visible one. Re-work labour, when a pallet leans or a base goes soft and somebody stacks it again by hand. Disposal, which is increasingly charged by volume or weight and increasingly reported. And the emergency re-order, which happens when the carton supplier cannot deliver in the middle of a short season and the buyer pays anything to keep the line running. On a packhouse running a full season, the last three together are frequently larger than the first.
Why the emergency order is underrated
Corrugated is made to order against a specification and a print run, and lead times stretch when every grower in the region wants cartons in the same fortnight. A packhouse that has run out of cartons in week three of a six-week window has very little room to negotiate. A crate fleet already sitting in the yard does not have that problem, which is a resilience argument rather than a cost one and is worth stating separately.
What the crate side actually costs
Capital, spread over the number of trips the crates survive. Washing, which is water, chemical and labour. Return transport, which is the expensive part when the loop is long. And losses, which are always higher than expected in the first season. All four are real and none of them appear on a carton invoice, which is exactly why the comparison has to be written down rather than argued.
Trip count decides everything
A crate that survives thirty trips and a crate that survives three hundred are different products with the same purchase price per trip only if the loop actually returns them. The variable that most often breaks the arithmetic is not the crate, it is the return rate. Before comparing prices, find out what proportion of crates came back last season – if nobody measures it, that is the first thing to fix. The payback method is set out in payback on PP crates versus single-use.
Where owning loses
Short seasons, single-crop operations with a long dead period, and any business where the crate would spend ten months a year stored outdoors. Capital tied up in crates that work six weeks a year is expensive, and pooling or hiring can beat owning outright in exactly that shape of business.
How to get the labour number
Ask the line supervisor how many pallets get re-worked in a week. Not the ones that fail – the ones somebody straightens up. Multiply by the minutes it takes and by the wage rate, and that is the annual re-work cost, and it is usually larger than anybody expected because nobody has ever multiplied it out.
Add the disposal line from the waste contractor’s invoice and the emergency re-order from the last season if there was one. Three numbers, none of them on the carton invoice, and together they usually decide the comparison. Where they do not, the honest conclusion is to stay on cartons, and that is a legitimate outcome.
What we can do
We quote returnable produce crates with a realistic service life rather than a best case, and we will build the comparison against your carton costs including the labour and disposal lines if you can give us the numbers. Tell us the season length and the trip count you expect and we will tell you where it breaks even.