Safeway's Custom Ice Cream Packaging Yields Shelf Pop and Savings

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January 4, 2011

Safeway has introduced a new 48-oz custom-shaped container for its store brand ice cream that not only creates shelf pop, but yielded production efficiencies and other cost savings.

A Greener Package report goes so far as to posit whether retailers such as Safeway are signaling “a fundamental shift in approach to private-label package design. Are store brands on the cusp of bringing a new dimension to store shelves? Structural innovation largely has been the domain of national brands.”

Safeway can manufacture the ice cream containers on-demand and switch flavors or sizes, using Huhtamaki’s in-plant forming machines.

“This in-house system, and our partnership with Huhtamaki, allowed us to respond to marketplace conditions with ease, speed, and relatively little expense,” Ed Olivero, Safeway vice president of dairy manufacturing told Greener Packaging. “From start to finish, package design, as well as tooling, installation, and production, was accomplished within six months. Actual conversion of five forming units in both of our ice cream plants was completed within a week, and we were feeding new containers directly into the filling lines.”

The new paperboard container with a poly coating will be used to market more than 60 ice cream SKUs across a variety of Safeway store brands, including Safeway Select, Lucerne, Eating Right and Jersey Maid.

The container is 6.37 inches tall and features a 2-deg taper, which yielded design and graphics benefits.
“Safeway doesn’t have to build inventories and stage them for production,” said Allison Vande Kieft, Huhtamaki sales account manager. “The in-house formers feed directly into filling lines. And because flat container sidewalls take up so much less space than a preformed option, they can keep some components on the floor and can change packaging on-the-fly, literally in minutes.”

The new carton design also yields transportation, inventory, and warehouse cost savings, according to the report.

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