How full to fill it

The empty space at the top of a supplement tub does more work than in most categories, which is why it is larger than customers think it should be.

Headspace has three jobs here

Settling. A low-density powder consolidates substantially in transit, so the tub the customer opens has more headspace than the one you filled. Fill to the brim and it arrives compacted with no room to scoop.

The scoop. A scoop sitting on top of the powder needs somewhere to sit, and a scoop buried in a full tub is one the customer digs for with their hand.

Mixing room is not a factor in a tub, but scooping room is: a leveled scoop needs space above the powder to level against.

The complaint you will get

"The tub was half empty." It is a common complaint in the category and it is usually a correct observation about a correctly filled tub.

Protein and greens powders have very low bulk density, so an accurate net weight occupies far more volume than a customer's intuition, and then settles.

The answer is a tub sized against the settled volume with deliberate headspace, not a tub sized generously and then filled to weight.

Air is a cost

Headspace is oxygen, and for anything with fat in it, whey and other animal proteins in particular, which oxidize faster than plant-based, that oxygen is a shelf-life cost.

So the aim is the minimum headspace that does the three jobs, not a comfortable margin.

Setting the fill

Fill to weight with a scale, target slightly above the declared quantity, and validate the tub choice by filling a real sample, transporting or tapping it, and looking at it the next day.

That test costs one tub and it prevents a complaint on every unit of a production run.

References