Better communication, greater transparency, demand flexibility, and consistent quality paired with proactive innovation. Those are the four fixes CPG brands said they need most from co-pack partners in a 2026 Packaging World reader survey.

You should expect proactive updates on production status, shipping notifications before you ask, quality documentation with photo evidence, and reporting customized to your KPIs, not generic templates.

Adding a contract packaging partner works best when you treat it as network optimization, not vendor replacement. Start with a defined scope, run parallel production during transition, and establish communication protocols from day one.

--> You're building a budget, evaluating a make-vs-buy decision, or trying to figure out if outsourcing that club pack program even makes sense. And every contract packager you talk to hides behind "it depends" or wants you to submit an RFP before they'll share real numbers.

If you've ever calculated the cost of your in-house multipack assembly, there's a good chance you've underestimated it. Not because your team is bad at math. The issue is that most cost spreadsheets miss the expenses that don't show up on a purchase order. The overtime surge in October. The production line that sat idle in February. The retailer chargeback that took three months to resolve. After working with CPG brands for over seven decades, we've seen this pattern many times with snack food manufacturers, confectionery companies, and other food producers. Companies believe in-house multipack assembly costs them $X per unit, when the real number is often 40% higher. That gap can mean the difference between a profitable product line and one that quietly drains margin quarter after quarter. Here's what most brands miss, and how to know when outsourcing makes more financial sense than keeping secondary packaging in-house.

If you are looking for a way to sell more products and add more value for your customers, multi-packs and variety-packs may be right for you. When consumers go into a store to do their weekly shopping, they are not there just to grab a soda and a sandwich. They are there because they are stocking up on supplies for the next week or month. In this situation, consumers are often looking to buy multiple items of the same products. In this respect, consumers will have to grab a product, put it in their shopping cart, and repeat this process until they have enough items for their weekly or monthly shopping. Before the arrival of multi-packs and variety-packs, this took a lot more time and effort and made the shopping experience less enjoyable. The total cost of buying multiple single items is also more expensive, which is just adding insult to injury for the consumer. But, thanks to multi-packs and variety-packs, buying identical bulk products has become much easier for the consumer and more profitable for you as the seller. A customer can easily grab a multi-pack or variety pack, which is often made from bundling film, and place all of the items at once into their shopping cart. This allows the consumer to spend less time and money and improves the shopping experience. After reading this article, you will know if selling multi-packs and variety packs is right for your business. But what are the benefits of multi-packs and variety-packs for you? In this article, we will review these benefits.