Case packing and shipping

The case is how wholesale buys, how freight is priced and how your product arrives intact or does not.

Cases are a unit of sale

Twelve is the default for five ounce hot sauce and it is what a buyer's ordering system expects. Six works for heavier or larger formats and for retailers who take small quantities.

Pick one and keep it. Changing case count mid-relationship breaks a retailer's pricing, their shelf planning and their reorder habit, and it is remembered.

Protecting glass

A partitioned case is worth the small extra cost. Bottles that touch each other in transit chip at the neck and shoulder, and a chipped bottle in a case of eleven good ones is a rejected case.

Fill the case. A partly full case lets bottles move, and movement is what breaks them. If you are shipping nine bottles, pack them in a case sized for nine or fill the gap properly.

What freight actually costs

Glass is heavy and freight is priced by weight for small shipments and by pallet space at volume. A case of twelve five ounce glass bottles is heavier than people estimate, and the shipping on a single case to a distant retailer can be a substantial fraction of its wholesale value.

That arithmetic is why minimum orders exist, and why a distributor taking a cut can still be cheaper than shipping cases individually.

Shipping direct to a customer

Double box or use a molded insert, and treat the closure as the failure point rather than the glass. A bottle that survives the drop but weeps at the thread arrives as a sticky box, and to the customer that is the same as broken.

Build the packaging cost into the price before you set it. Producers routinely take their market price online and discover the margin went to corrugate and freight.

References