Printed cartons for 10, 12 or 24 single serve capsules, with a divider if you want one so the pods don’t rattle or crush. We’d say SBS if it’s going on a supermarket shelf, kraft if you’re a small roaster, then gloss or matte or a bit of foil on top.
Your time is very important to us so we have kept it short.
Pods look tough. They’re not. Press something sharp on the foil lid and it punctures, and drop a box of 24 on its corner and the plastic cups along the bottom row can crack, so our custom coffee pod boxes get sized for the capsules to sit snug in their rows, often with a card divider or a little tray, and that pack then has to live through a store shelf and the back of a delivery van.
Who buys them? Small roasters starting a pod line, mostly. Private label folks too, and office coffee suppliers who are tired of plain brown cases and want their own name on there. Everybody asks for the same two things, really: don’t let the pods get crushed, and make the flavor obvious in half a second.
How many per box? We see 12 and 24 the most, though 10 and 36 come up, and the odd 16.
Upright or on their sides is the bit people argue about. Standing up looks neater when the lid comes off. Laid down, you save height, and we’ve had a roaster pick that purely because the grocery shelf gap near him was short.
And the capsule systems aren’t the same size at all. A K-cup style pod is taller and fatter than a Nespresso style one, so send us your actual pod (a real one in an envelope beats a spec sheet every time). A couple of millimeters of slack is fine. Any more than that and they shuffle about every time someone lifts the box.
Going into stores? Then SBS paperboard, nine times out of ten, because flavor names and roast levels come out clean and bright on it. Kraft looks more like an indie roaster and we like it with one or two colors. If you mail pods straight to subscribers we’d move you to a thin E-flute corrugated mailer, and our cardstock vs corrugated comparison walks through the choice if you’re stuck.
Freshness is mostly the pods’ job. They’re sealed, or if they’re compostable and not wrapped one by one you’d put an inner foil bag in. The carton just keeps light out and stops crushing, and a tuck end with dust flaps shuts tight, plus a tear strip means nobody’s stabbing the box with a butter knife at 6am (we’ve all done it).
Got five flavors? Keep one design and swap a colored band per roast, that’s what we’d do, and then a shopper sees your brand from the end of the aisle and grabs hazelnut by the color before reading a word. We like matte for that calm cafe look, with maybe a little spot UV on a coffee bean drawing to catch the store lights.
Sell whole bean or ground too? Our custom coffee boxes can share the same artwork, and there’s tea and snack stuff in the wider food and beverage packaging range. We set up the dieline and lay out your artwork free, check the files for print problems, then send a digital proof.
Ten or twelve in a tight box, loose is usually fine. Once you’re at 24 and up, we’d add one so the bottom row isn’t carrying everything.
Yep. We perforate the front panel, you tear it off, and it turns into a little dispenser for an office coffee station or a cafe counter.
Not many, often around 50 boxes depending on the style, and the per-box price drops as volume climbs. Send us your pod count and flavors and we’ll quote it.
Brands ordering these often look at custom pet food packaging boxes, custom fast food boxes, custom hotdog boxes and custom frozen food boxes as well. You can see the full range in food and beverage.
