Curious Conversations, a Research Podcast

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Travis

I think one of life's simple joys is getting a package. It doesn't really matter if it's something that I ordered or something someone sent to me. Simply getting a box on my doorstep with my name on it gives me a little bit of excitement, and it's always really fun to open up. But as much as I like packages, aside from a few frustrations with children's toys, I haven't really given much thought to packaging. And since when I look around the store, pretty much everything is in something, I'm curious what goes all into the design of these packages, as well as what factors can change that over time. And thankfully, this is the research expertise of Virginia Tech's Laszlo Horvath, and he was kind enough to talk to me about it.

Laszlo is an associate professor in the College of Natural Resources and Environment, as well as the Director of Virginia Tech's Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design. His research interests include packaging sustainability, smart and connected packaging, and unit load interactions.

Laszlo and I talked about all the things that go into designing a package for products that really have to go through environments they're not actually made to be in. We also talked about the role affordability and sustainability plays in designing these packages, as well as the end user experience of opening the package. And Laszlo also shared his thoughts on how things like tariffs or any other international or national conflicts that disrupt the supply chain can influence packaging and ultimately change the cost for consumers. and we also talked a little about the frustrations that come with opening a child's toy. I swear that's like the hardest thing to get out in the entire world. And he told me the research behind actually making those packages bigger. So going to want to stick around for that and of course follow, rate, and or subscribe to the podcast. I'm Travis Williams and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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Travis

I feel like all of us, most of us get packages, but when we talk about packaging, what all does that encompass?

Laszlo

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. A lot of people don't really talk about packaging in general. then if, but once you start thinking about it, packages are all over us, all around us. If you go into Kroger, every single item that you ever want to buy, probably except produce, gonna be the package. The bottled water that you get, the soda that you get, the cheese that you get your meat, everything is in a package. And somebody needs to design all of those packages. Or if you go to Best Buy, then every electronics that you buy is in a package. Even the items that you don't see in a package, like microwaves or refrigerators, they all come packaged to the store to make sure that they don't break. And what is fascinating in this area when we start thinking about it, The items that you buy normally are designed for a specific purpose, like a TV that you buy. It's designed to be in your living room under controlled conditions, maybe hanging on a wall. It's really not designed to be going through a global supply chain, bouncing around in sea containers and trailers and experience extreme colds and heats and fluctuations of relative humidities. So we need to create packages that protect those products throughout those journeys so they get to wherever you can, you as a customer can buy them.

Travis

You know, I never thought about it in that way, but it's almost like you're bundling up something to send it out into some harsh conditions that it's not even made for. Much like you would, I guess, dress a kid up to go outside and play in the snow. Correct, correct. Does the journey of the package, how does that influence how you would design packaging for that product?

Laszlo

it has a major influence on it. The journey has a major influence. And then what goes into a packaging has a major influence. So if you think about the journey, it makes a huge difference whether I create a product in Pennsylvania and I want to move it to Virginia. And it's maybe going to be on a truck for a little bit, go to a local Best Buy, walk in and buy it versus it's going to be manufactured in China. It needs to go on a truck, get to a port, skip over the ocean, come to California, get on a truck, get on a train get to through Chicago, go to Norfolk, get on a truck again and get to us. That makes a huge difference in how we need to package the products. would be the biggest difference in how you would package, I mean, broadly speaking, an international product versus something we might get from Pennsylvania in Virginia? So one is longer the trip, the amount of times the packages handled increases. And every time when somebody handles the package, there is a potential of the package being dropped or compressed or hit.

Even if the package is sitting on a pallet and the forklift handles it, it's still being impacted by the forklift. And if manual labor handles the packaging, then there is more chance for a drop. So that's one element of it, that is just more handling. Conditions normally change. So if you think about producing something in Costa Rica in high humidity, high temperature and shipping it to Alaska, where the temperature are going to drop throughout the journey. Now we have to account for change in relative humidity, change in temperature different transportation modes like railcars versus parcel delivery vehicles make a difference because they shake differently. The package sits differently in those. So we need to take those into consideration.

Travis

When you all create, let's say you design a package to be transported a certain way, how does that get communicated back to, I guess, the shippers?

Laszlo

So not really. What we need to do is we need to understand the package will be shipped because somebody who makes the product predetermines that like where exactly it's going to be produced and shipped. And then we need to design for whatever conditions it goes through. So there is actually interesting trends on it that for example, you want to ship something out in FedEx and you want them to handle it more gently. So what is the first thing that you want to do is put a fragility label on it. So fragility labels make zero difference in transportation. So there was a study that investigated if you put one label on it, if you put one label on every side, if you make the shipping label red to indicate that it doesn't make a single difference, it's gonna be handled exactly the same way. So people in transportation, their goal is to move products or cargo through the system as fast as possible. And this is something that we teach the students that you have to understand how transportation works and what the goal of the people who are in that logistics networks is, and normally is, move the goods through the system as fast as possible. And packaging needs to resist those impacts. Because if you tell a forklift driver to be more gentle, then the driver can't handle as many unit loads and not going to meet the quota. So not going to the company are going to make money, the driver going to be fired. So we need to make those unit loads strong enough so when the forklift flies into the opening and hits it, it's not going to break.

Travis

It sounds like that you're almost always designing things for the worst case scenario for these products?

Laszlo

Correct. we try to normally when we have sensors that we can put on vehicles or we can create instrumented packages that we can send to parcel delivery systems. And we determine the hazards, the packaging experiences, vibrations, number of drops, orientations, heights. And then we design for the 95th percentile normally. So we design for the harshest, not the, not the harshest even, but the top. 95 % basically of events just because you don't want to design for the harshest even because you can have a drop in the field that is 60 inches. We had a package coming through one of these trials and in Roanoke we saw 57 inches toss into the the truck. the package somebody took that package and just tossed it into the into the vehicle before the delivery driver took it to us there is an extremely harsh event that package is going to do whatever is in the package going to break at that point. But the next harshest could be a 20 inches drop. So there is a huge difference there.

Travis

Well, how do you factor in like affordability and I sustainability when you're designing packages?

Laszlo

So sustainability is huge and affordability are two hugely important elements for packaging. And one of the reasons is because you as a customer packaging doesn't create a volume for you. We call packaging as a non-value adding but necessary component. Then non-value adding is debatable because sometimes a package does add some value. But if you look at it from you as a customer, if your iPhone magically appear on your desk, you would be as happy as getting it in the package in a box or your TV just magically appear in the living room. You would not have any heartburn that you didn't get the box and the styrofoam planks around it. So our goal is to use the absolute bare minimum packaging for it. Because when a customer prices the product, the packaging is an expense that makes products more expensive that you as a customer don't really want to pay for. Now, the way how we do this is we try to estimate what amount of failures we can afford. So for example, we ship unit loads of baked bean in a can, in a metal can, a steel can. You buy baked beans in a store and has some dinks and dents on it, maybe the label has some scratches or tears on it, you don't really care. We are talking about the 78 cent product. It doesn't really matter to us if there is a little damage to it. You buy a $2,000 chair, it makes a huge difference whether there's a little scratch on it. So we designed $2,000 dining room chairs to 99.9 % survivability because losing one is just a huge cost. Or we tested, for example, a CPR unit for first responders when you know, get into an accident, you put it on your chest, strap it to you, and it keeps pumping your heart to survive. That has an extremely high survivability because you don't want this equipment not to work when somebody's life needs to be saved. But you buy something cheap, like you ship bricks, baked beans, know, bottled water, none of those are really, really important. So we can lose some. We rather save money on the packaging and the millions of units that we send out and we just lose a couple of thousand of those.

Travis

Yeah, sounds like it's a give and take type scenario. I have in my life bought far more cans of baked beans than I have $2,000 chairs. I'll just be honest with you there.

Laszlo

Actually, I have an interesting example for a packaging problem related to furniture. For example, we have a company that we tested a lot of knockdown furniture, know, the IKEA style ready to assemble. You get the panels, you put it together. And their criteria was that if you have any dents on that package, that you can make disappear with a Sharpie. So imagine like a black furniture, you have any sketches on it. I take a Sharpie, put a dot on it. It disappears. It's a pass. Anything more, it's a failure. But it was a $40 shelf. So they had 90 % failure in all their packages because they couldn't afford to put a lot of packaging around it because the product wasn't expensive, but their failure criteria was matching a really expensive product. So then we helped them revise the criteria. And then we were helping them understand that you have a shelf, you as a customer, you don't see the bottom of the shelf. So any damage on the bottom of the shelf, any damage on the back is not something that you're to return the products for. So we accepted more damages in non-visible areas. We accepted less damages in areas that are more visible. And we can help them optimize the packaging costs so we don't have 90 % failure rate in testing that requires them to add more packaging on a product that is real cheap.

Travis

How much do you all consider how hard or how easy is going to be for me as the consumer to get something out of the package when you design it? Because sometimes I really struggle with this.

Laszlo

It really depends on product specific. A lot of times you do consider it. And there is this whole unboxing experience that, especially for more higher end products, you actually look at how you're to get to your products. you get some of the more expensive appliances once I got the Juicer and you get this nice graphics over it and then you open the flaps and then even the internal boxes have the graphics. had the package had like an apple on it because the juicer was designed to put full apple in it. And then once I opened it, there was a little box with accessories and that had the apple in it. Then I opened that and the graphics just kept going through the entire package. It was so consistent. Everything was high-end materials. You could touch the paper and it was a softer paper. So you felt like you're buying a high-end equipment. There was even a study by one of the business schools that looked at a simple thing like a wooden bowl. they asked students to, there was one package that was a wooden bowl was basically in a styrofoam package. And there was another one that was more fiber-based with a little envelope explaining who made the bowl. So there's a little more to it. And then students rated the volume of the bowl 30 % higher when the packaging was more higher end and the packaging cost wasn't 30 % of the overall overall cost. So we as a customer, when you expect to buy something high end, you expect a high end packaging normally with it. When you buy something cheap, you expect the cheaper packages. But I can say that we consider it all the time. Like we have products where you get your Amazon boxes. Normally they are fairly simple. They have to be able to cut the tape and then to be able to get to it.

There are even criteria, for example, for Amazon to specify, to certify for the frustration-free packaging, you have to get to your product with reasonable devices that you might have at home. if you have a scissor, you should be able to open that packaging without any special tool, I think in 120 seconds. And if you can't, then it's not classified frustration-free.

Travis

I wonder, and I don't know if you all do any studying or any designing of packaging for children's toys, but I can promise you that some of those are the hardest things I've ever experienced trying to get into in my life.

Laszlo

I know that's what I wanted to bring up that maybe in something that is not frustration free is removing a toy from a toy box or packaging for children. I feel like that's a test in and of itself of both patience and skill. What is also interesting with children toys that that's where every packaging principle that we have changes. So normally you as a customer you want packages really small, just because like we want to have a small footprint. So it's more effective. It's more cost cheaper for the company to produce. And it's cheaper for you as a consumer to buy except children toys. So there was an initiative a long time ago where packaging engineers started to make children toys smaller. Cause if you think about the little figurines that you put into a package, you can condense them much more. That was a huge failure. Kids want to have big boxes, bigger the box, better the toys.

So that's one of the principles in children packaging that we have. That's why if you look at every packaging, they're extremely inefficient, but it's always needs to be a big box. So when the kid receives it at Christmas is really happy about it, got something huge. yeah. And often the box becomes either better than the toy or just another toy in another.

Travis

Well, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is when stuff impacts trade in our country, whether it be through tariffs or just other agreements. How does that impact packaging?

Laszlo

And it could have a significant impact on it. So the impact depends on companies and whether they source materials locally or whether they get products from or parts from the outside. Like we just visited the company yesterday in Winchester and it's a company that creates your returnable plastic trays. So if you see them in Kroger where you have your produce in it or plastic pallets, any type of returnable plastic solution.

And they have these molds that are used to make those products. And these are 500,000 to million dollar giant steel molds. now steel tariffs can affect them because the molds are produced in Europe or in China sometimes. So now you have a million dollar mold where 60 % of the cost could be the giant steel. And then once you increase the tariffs now that mold costs gonna go up.

Once that mold cost goes up, every single product that they're producing with that mold gonna grow up, gonna go up. And they were actually explaining to me a problem that they had once that when tariffs or rules change really fast, a mold takes 30 weeks to produce. So they ordered a mold for a big automotive company. It came into the U.S. a day after when the U.S. introduced the tariff change. So now there was a large extra amount of money that they had to pay extra tariffs on the mall that nobody expected because they ordered it way before the tariffs started. But then it arrived, there was a tariff. just the mall to help make the packages could in fact change how much maybe something costs to a consumer? Correct. Because at the end of the day, what's going to happen is that now you those plastic packages going to be more expensive. A variety of things can happen at that point. mean, somebody has to pay more for it. So it's either the consumer, some companies, their product has enough extra money that they can charge for it. So there's enough in the market that I can increase the cost of the product and then the consumer still pay for it. And then I just going to offset it and just send it to, we just increase the price of the product and then the customer is going to have to have to compensate or the cost or the company going to just eat up the cost. and then they're to reduce their profit margins if they can. then they, everybody always assumes that big corporations like PNG, big CPG companies that produce a lot of like shampoo, they're huge corporations making a lot of money. The problem is with those type of products, the profit is not much. You have percents of the package or the cost of the product that they are actually making. So they might have a one to 2 % extra profit on that item that they are selling. So they're not going to be able to eat this cost. So the shampoo going to go up. The other problem that a lot of people don't think about is you might look at companies who produce your aluminum cans and now aluminum can have tariffs. You might be lucky that the company who produces aluminum can sources everything in the U.S. But the liner that we have to line the aluminum cans come from Canada. So now the liner becomes more expensive. So sometimes things that we don't even think about are like parts of the packaging because the package can include a lot of different pieces, goes up. And at one point it's going to be a higher cost. Somebody has to pay for it.

Travis

Well, you talked a little bit about the affordability of packaging, but how might, I don't how might something like tariffs impact sustainable packaging?

Laszlo

So if I'm a packaging manufacturer and I don't want to increase the cost or I can't increase the cost of my products, then I have to, I have a couple options that I can do. I either have to use cheaper materials. So that might affect my choice of materials. I might have a sustainability initiative. I want to use something fiber based, something higher end, but now I have to go back to Styrofoam because I have to offset the cost. Or I might have to standardize. So I might identify that customers would like to buy drinks in specific bottles because that somehow is more exciting for them. But now I have to use the same bottle across all my product lines because I

can't afford diversifying one product line because now the cost is just too high. it does seem like that some packages and some products, in sustainable packaging is part of their brand.

Travis

So I would imagine that would be a, could be a cost increase maybe?

Laszlo

That would be correct. That would be a cost increase. And also what is interesting with sustainable packaging that 10 years ago, when there was a survey of customers,

Everybody wanted sustainable packaging. So the question was that would you prefer more sustainable packaging? 95 % of people said they do. The next question was, would you prefer, would you buy that sustainable packaging if the cost of the product would go up by a dollar or a couple percent? And then 95 % of the people said, I would not pay a single dime for sustainable packaging. This changed in the 2023, 24 surveys. Now 90 some percent of the people actually would pay more for sustainable packaging, which is really interesting that brands are starting to focus on. have a lot of development of sustainable packaging for companies, and there are a lot of commitment from the packaging companies that they're willing to pay more now for their packages just to make sure their product is transported on something that is more sustainable. it comes to different trade things, say something like a shipping route, changed because of trades? I don't know if that's possible or not, but if it did, would that impact the packaging that that product would have to be packaged in? And that does. And it could happen because of trade or we could have because of volatile supply chains. So it could be that there is a war in a country or terrorists are creating problems or it could be a natural disaster, something that modifies the route for that transportation. And now we have to find alternative ways to bring the products in.

So what happens if my ship needs to be diverted and now I have to transport my packaging or empty packaging on land. Now that packaging needs to go in a rail car. So I might not have thought about that rail cars produce a fairly significant horizontal shock when rail cars couple with each other. And if I didn't design for it, now we're to start having damages because my assumption was that everything is in a C container and then it might be on a truck and truck have breaking events of 0.6 G.

Real cars have 4G. So we are increasing it four or five times the impact on those packages. And now we can have failures that I never thought about or vibration. that happens even with... So my production facility gets... So if I'm a packaging company producing bottles and somehow I get delayed. So whoever is filling those bottles, Coke need those bottles and I need to air freight those bottles to them. So now it's a huge cost for me because I went from trucking or rail to air freight, which is really expensive. Now, vibrations in an air freight is completely different than a truck. So now I gotta start have scuff marks on my bottles because as I'm shipping them, they vibrate differently.

Travis

Well, what is something that you think maybe the average consumer, buyer of things is overlooking in this whole packaging equation?

Laszlo

One thing that is interesting is people Now I'm not 100 % confident that they're aware how much effect high performance packaging actually has on our daily life. So for example, you buy apple sauce and apple sauce come in the little plastic containers and then with a little film closing them and it's not refrigerated. So a lot of people look at it and they assume that that's filled with preservatives and it's bad for you. But a lot of people don't know that a lot of those containers are multi-layer plastics. So you actually have that plastic allows the transfer of certain gases in and out of that container, keeping your applesauce stable. Or when you look at your cake cups, the cake cups is actually a seven layer plastic to allow the migration of different gases to in and out of the cake cup to allow your coffee to breathe inside and then increase freshness. So a lot of really simple things that we don't think twice about make a big difference. One of the examples that I always bring up is beef.

When we want to buy beef, we want to buy nice, juicy red beef. The only problem is once you cut that beef the first time, starts oxidizing, immediately going to start creating that red color. But if you leave it there for a period of time, changes color. So what you always want is that fresh cut. So what we actually do, we put them into trays that have this technology map, modified atmosphere packaging. We actually fill that tray with different gases, normally a lot of nitrogen.

And then what we do is from the standpoint of a beef, the beef never left the cow. It's so basically it doesn't start that oxidation. doesn't look great. When we tear off a little label, it starts filtering oxygen into the packages and now the beef starts turning red. So we almost make it look like that we never cut the meat out of the animal to be able to sell it. So it increases the shelf life because now we don't have that oxidation process that actually makes beef go bad faster. We can keep it longer, but then once before we sell it, the beef going to magically turn red. And then you as a customer assumes that we just cut it five minutes ago.

Travis

That is fascinating. That is the reason that we've all been buying beef that way for so long and we just didn't know it.

Laszlo

And that's why people didn't like vacuum packages because vacuum packages actually, vacuum sealed packages keep products or beef really, really fresh. The problem is the beef becomes more purplish color when you pull oxygen out. And for years, customers had a hard time with that. They looked at the vacuum sealed package and something was off. It's not the red color that we want. It took decades by the time the industry convinced the customers that that purple color is okay. That's normal for the beef to look like that.

Travis

Well, there's one last thing that I want to ask you. What is your favorite thing to get in a package?

Laszlo

That's a hard question. Honestly, think that the the the favorite package that I get or when I get something is like I love the Apple packages just because they are so nice and sophisticated. Every time I open the package, it's always something even the way how they seal it or the way how they use the the little trace. It's actually look like plastic, but it actually just really, really finely compressed paper trays. So those are really nice sophisticated packages and I'm always, every time I open them, always amazed.

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Travis

And thanks to Lazlo for talking to us about all the things that go into designing packaging. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at dt.edu. I'm Travis Williams and this has been Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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