Korpack

"Eco-friendly" on the spec sheet does not mean sellable in all fifty states. Maine's ban on intentionally added PFAS in plant-fiber food packaging took effect May 25. At least a dozen states now restrict PFAS in food packaging, each with its own scope and dates, and more take effect through 2027. The grease-resistant coating on a lot of paper and molded-fiber packaging is exactly what these laws target. Here is the trap. The sustainability box gets checked when a brand moves to fiber. Nobody asks what makes the fiber grease-proof. The same pack that won the eco story becomes a market-access problem, and the first person to catch it is often a retail buyer or a distributor asking for documentation, not a regulator. The expensive answer is tracking which SKU is legal in which state. That is a spreadsheet that never stops changing. The cheaper answer is one verified PFAS-free spec across the board, built once, defensible everywhere you sell. And verified is the key word. PFAS did three jobs at once: grease resistance, moisture, and machine runnability. Replacing it is a barrier-engineering decision, not a line swap. A supplier writing "PFAS-free" on a datasheet is not the same as test data behind a spec. When a buyer asks your team for PFAS documentation, how fast can you produce it? #PFAS #FoodPackaging #CPG #RetailCompliance #PackagingCompliance

How do you scale a company without sacrificing speed, service, or trust? Korpack founder and CEO Nick Novy sat down on Episode 43 of Elevate, the podcast from Braden Business Systems, to answer exactly that. The conversation covers Nick's path from packaging engineering at Michigan State through sales leadership to launching Korpack in 2015, and the three differentiators the company is built on: speed, technology, and trust. One theme runs through the whole episode: tools like ERP, automation, and AI matter because they give people time back to solve problems and build stronger customer relationships, not because they replace anyone. What does trust look like in your supplier relationships? #Packaging #Leadership #Manufacturing #SupplyChain Watch the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/g_469gVr

August 12 is not that far. That is the day the EU's new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation starts applying, and it treats packaging as a condition of market access, not a detail. What becomes mandatory on day one is mostly paperwork with teeth: a Declaration of Conformity for every packaging type, technical documentation to back it, substance limits including PFAS in food-contact packaging, and EPR registration in the member states where you sell. The design mandates phase in behind it, with harmonized labeling by 2028 and recyclability grades and right-sizing rules by 2030. For US brands, the first enforcement contact usually is not a regulator. It is the EU importer, retailer, or marketplace that carries legal responsibility for your packaging and starts asking for composition data, weights, and specs you may never have compiled. No data, no listing. The uncomfortable question to ask this month: could your team produce a complete spec for every component of every pack you ship to Europe? Material, weight, composition, supplier documentation? That data discipline is the whole game, and it is an engineering habit, not a legal one. If you sell into the EU, has anyone in your supply chain asked for packaging documentation yet? #PPWR #PackagingCompliance #EUMarket #CPG #PackagingEngineering

For a while, packaging EPR felt like a coastal story. That's changing. Seven states now have laws that make producers pay fees based on the packaging they put on the market, with hard-to-recycle materials costing more and recyclable ones costing less. Two of them, Oregon and Colorado, are already collecting. And closer to home, Illinois has a recycling needs assessment underway, with a report due to the legislature this December, the same groundwork that came before programs in other states. The throughline in all of it: "recyclable" is shifting from a marketing word to a claim you have to substantiate, and packaging material is shifting from a design choice to a line-item cost. None of this requires panic. It rewards planning. The brands that look at their packaging materials now, before a fee or a deadline forces it, are the ones who get to make the change on their own terms. If a fee were attached to every hard-to-recycle component in your packaging tomorrow, would you know what it would cost you? #Packaging #SustainablePackaging #EPR #Manufacturing #Midwest

Your damage rate is lying to you. Practitioners put beverage breakage in parcel shipping at 1 to 2 percent. On a spreadsheet, it reads like a rounding error. On a P&L, it compounds: one broken bottle soaks every label around it, the customer opens a sticky box, and the refund turns out to be the cheapest part of the loss. The reorder that never comes is the expensive part. Here is the pattern we keep seeing when brands move from retail cases to doorstep parcels. The pack that survived a palletized truck run gets handed to a network that drops, sorts, and stacks every box by hand. Different trip, same packaging. Then the claims process blames the carrier for what was really a packaging decision: wrong shipper for the bottle, container loose in the divider, reused corrugated that lost its strength. The fix is not more void fill. It is engineering. Immobilize every container, absorb shock and vibration, rate the box for the real loaded weight, and do it without over-packing, because parcel carriers bill you by weight and size. In DTC, the box on the doorstep is the brand moment. Engineer it for the worst trip, not the average one. For anyone running beverage DTC: where does damage show up for you first, in claims data or in repeat-purchase numbers? #BeveragePackaging #DTC #Ecommerce #SupplyChain #PackagingEngineering

Swapping shrink film for paperboard looks simple until the pallet starts moving. Film holds a multipack together with tension. Paperboard does it with structure. That means board grade, caliper, and die design have to be matched to the specific container, count, and weight, or the pack crushes, tears, and collapses under stacking. Most of the failures we see trace back to the same thing: the change was handled as a purchasing swap instead of a design problem. EPR fees are making this switch inevitable for a lot of beverage brands. The engineering decides whether it actually works on the line and through the supply chain. For the packaging people here: what failure mode do you see most when brands move from film to fiber? #PackagingEngineering #BeveragePackaging #Paperboard #EPR

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The meat snack category has grown fast, and packaging is quietly where a lot of brands either scale cleanly or stall out. Four decisions decide which way it goes: Format and barrier come first. Meat snacks fail from oxygen, moisture, and grease migration, so the film structure and the seal integrity matter more than the graphics. Get the barrier wrong and shelf life becomes a returns problem before the product ever gets a second order. USDA co-packing is not optional. Meat snacks are USDA territory, which means daily on-site inspection and a different food-safety framework than most F&B products. The right co-packing partner has that in place and can prove the scope covers your product. Filling and packing at scale is the step growing brands underestimate. Fill-seal, nitrogen flushing, cartoning, and variety packs are where a hand-packed process breaks down and consistency starts to slip. Building that line in-house is a real capital and labor decision. Scaling with demand is the last one. New SKUs, seasonal spikes, and retail resets all need flexible capacity that a fixed line can't always absorb. None of these are the last thing you figure out before launch. For a category moving this fast, packaging is part of the growth plan, not an afterthought to it. Where are you seeing brands get tripped up first, barrier or capacity? #MeatSnacks #FoodAndBeverage #ContractPackaging #PackagingEngineering #CPG

"We haven't had a shipping problem" is not the same as "we won't have one." Four things decide whether that stays true for electronics manufacturers, and most companies manage them as four unrelated vendor relationships instead of one system: -In-transit damage: whether protection was engineered around how your product actually fails, or just scaled up from a generic foam spec. -Export compliance: whether your crating clears ISPM 15, or gets flagged and held at customs because nobody checked before it shipped. -Packing consistency: whether protection is the same on every unit, or depends on who happened to be running the line that day. -Vendor sprawl: whether one partner owns the outcome, or four suppliers each own a piece and none of them own the failure. Here's what procurement teams miss: none of this shows up in a quote comparison. It shows up in a damage claim, a customs delay, or a customer who quietly moves their business elsewhere. Treat packaging as one engineered system and these stop being four risks you're managing. They become one relationship you're not worried about. Which one of these is costing your team the most right now? #PackagingEngineering #ElectronicsManufacturing #SupplyChain #Procurement

Happy Fourth of July from all of us at Korpack. However you're celebrating this weekend, whether it's a cookout with family, fireworks with friends, or a well-earned day off, we hope it's a great one. Thank you to our customers, partners, and team for another year of hard work and strong partnerships. Have a safe and happy holiday. #FourthofJuly #IndependenceDay #TeamKorpack