What type of bottle or supplements container is right for your product?

 

The traditional material of choice for cans, aluminum is also sometimes used for bottles and jars.

Contrary to popular belief, aluminum cans do contain plastic—they’re lined with it to protect both the consumer and liquid inside. Depending on your market, different sizes and styles will be popular.

But cans are not all there is—these days you can get aluminum bottles, too, and sometimes even jars and similar smaller containers, but the availability of those is highly limited in comparison.

The biggest issue with aluminum containers from the point of view of a start-up with a new product idea is the relatively high minimum order quantities required—typically in the hundreds of thousands if you want them painted with your design. 

To side-step this, if you absolutely require an aluminum can or bottle, smaller-batch productions are possible—you just go for unpainted and usually well-stocked aluminum containers. To give them branding, a sleeve-type label is usually the preferred method, though you can also make do with a wrap-around label if you can make your design work with the typically grey/silver-ish color of the can or bottle.

Glass

Next on the list: glass. Glass is a bit interesting in that humanity went through a phase of using almost exclusively glass containers, to not using almost any, and back to glass being on the menu. 

Sometimes considered a more environmentally-friendly category, glass containers come in many shapes: bottles, jars, jugs. It offers excellent properties, such as hand-feel and chemical stability. Glass also has a bit of a Halo-effect going on for it, with many environmentally-conscious consumers having a preference for it.

Realistically, glass isn’t as light on the planet as most people think—glass production is an incredibly high-energy manufactory. 

Moreover, the bottles break (higher proportion of waste) much more easily. They’re also much heavier than aluminum or plastic, so it costs more to transport and distribute to shelves. 

Returnable glass containers are popularly believed to be a low lifecycle emissions container, but for the reasons outlined already, in addition to the extra transportation required for them to return to their origin, plus the need for sanitization (a lot of water), plus the need for crates so that they can be loaded on pallets, glass’ impact is a complicated topic. It’s also considerably harder ($$$) to customize a glass container in comparison with, say, plastic, due to mold complexity and the realities of furnaces being efficient only when they’re non-stop fired up, making changeovers relatively expensive.

Regardless, glass is glass and it has been trending back up, so the above is more of an aside in case sustainability of your product is a major concern for you.

Paper

Finally, paper—and it’s tougher cousin, carton.

Now, while there are ways to put drinks in carton containers (they’re lined with plastic to prevent disintegration), it’s usually significantly more complicated than the other three. Which is why they’re usually reserved for fruit juices and milks, although that’s simply a choice, not a necessity—you can put those categories of beverages in containers from plastic, aluminum or glass just as well.

Separately, paper (and oftentimes, paper-feeling) packaging in the form of bags and pouches is quite popular with supplements. To protect the delicate ingredients inside and avoid oxidation, however, these bags are also usually lined in order to create a safe atmosphere inside.

Cost

Last, but not least—in some use-cases it’s the most important factor—cost.

Depending on your go-to-market strategy and the nature & purpose of your product, cost of packaging may or may not constitute a significant share of the manufacturing cost of your, surely awesome, next Private Label product.

For example, a Home Care product we helped bring to the Western EU markets was sold in the $10-$15 ballpark, so a few cents more on packaging made a small dent on overall margins.

On the other hand, some beverages are manufactured with the expectations that customers will pay $1 or less per bottle, and that’s after they’ve made the trek from our facilities, through a distributor, and into your local store. Since everyone along the chain is working for a profit, you can see how a cent here, a cent there, can quickly become problematic.

Frankly, packaging costs deserve a separate article all on their own, because the topic is more nuanced than you may have considered.

In the past, we’ve had products that were A/B tested, meaning that two versions of packaging were available on the market. The vastly more premium-packaged (and expensive) version outperformed the plainer, more cost-effective variant, despite selling significantly less due to its higher price. This indicates that rarely, fewer sales can lead to better outcomes.

Another illuminating example was when one of our “basic” offerings was notably cheaper than alternatives (although the stuff inside was on par with the average competitor product in the category). In that instance, the lower price worked against the product (yes, a paradox) because it “surely” must be low-quality if it’s cheaper, right?

Other times, specifically if your product belongs to a trending category, but the space is swiftly being contested, resigning yourself to lower initial margins can help capture market share and build oh-so-important relationships with distributers and retailers. Once a significant share is secured, and brand recognition is high enough, the price is increased to achieve better margins—you’ve probably seen this happen in the past.