Coup d'oeil of Folding Carton

Folding Carton: Identity

Boxes made of thick paperboard that are creased and folded to form containers that are generally shipped and stored flat and erected at the point where they are filled with the product. Folding cartons  are used for sales, storage and shipping various products and are generally small enough to hold in one hand.

Produced flat

Shipped after pasting & creasing 

         

Erected while filling the product

Finally in retail shelf 

PAPERBOARD PACKAGING FAMILY (An infographic)

Folding Carton Family Hierarchy

There are thousands and thousands of folding carton styles floating around in the market. As the number of designs grew globally - identification and communication of a design became increasingly a problem between the product maker (who needs a package for the product) and the package producer (a.k.a converter).
There was a global need to classify various package designs into multiple groups and identify each one of them with a unique ID. This unique ID was aimed at removing any culture specific jargon for a design and to facilitate clear communication at all levels of design and manufacture.

One of the most famous organizations that created a global standard for folding cartons was ECMA (European Carton Makers Association). In October 1960, ten national carton associations in Europe founded ECMA. It was principally created to build a formal structured network - to engage in cross border communication, to promote exchange of market data and to promote technical development of equipment used in carton industry.
In 1967 - ECMA published a CODE - the ECMA Code of Folding Carton Design Styles - as a design book. In 2009, the first electronic version of the standards was introduced as a stand-alone application.


In the new digital ECMA code, users can:

• Browse and search through the catalog of designs
• View the folding sequence of the most common designs in an interactive 3D environment
• Export the design drawings in a CAD - CAM friendly vector format

Here is where you can get a demo version of this application (valid for 10 days). This is sold at a price of € 476.00 (approximately 33,000 INR) and can be bought here.

Without any further ado, here is a look at how they have classified the Folding Carton family:

Birth and growth - significance:

Like so many other inventions, the birth of folding carton was also as a result of an accident. 
It happened in the year 1879, in Brooklyn - where Robert Gair had a paper bag factory. The paper bags were being printed in letter press. 

BIRTH

One such day, while producing seed bags - a careless press man failed to notice that a type rule had been set too high and it had cut through and ruined 20000 seed bags. 
Then the 'EUREKA' moment came. Mr. Gair was intrigued by the clean incisions across the seed bags. It occurred to him in a flash - that there was a way of constructing a multiple die that would cut and crease box board in a single operation. 
The ruined seed bags - inspired Gair to create a die - in which he can set sharp cutting blades a little higher than blunt creasing rules of the press - thus cutting and creasing in a single operation. 

GROWTH

The folding cartons earned prestige in 1896, when the National Biscuit Company began to sell Uneeda biscuits in cartons. The biscuits were wrapped inside a wax paper liner inside a tray-styled carton. The colorful printed wrapper featured a boy in a raincoat - to emphasize moisture barrier. 
This was a very significant event - because - for the first time - users could buy biscuits in a clean unit size package, rather than having the retailer measure out a quantity from a large biscuit barrel where the biscuits where exposed to moisture, odors, insects and breakage.   
The UNEEDA biscuit carton also represented the birth of brand advertising that relies on the package as a sales tool. Furthermore, it symbolized the shift of power from retailers to manufacturers. By packaging at the factory rather than at the store, and by making their products easy to recognize - manufacturers were able to take control. 

Why should I opt for this type of packaging?

Celebrities

• SRT (Standard Reverse Tuck) (and Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar of folding cartons)

Most commonly viewed package. Very good packing efficiency (because the flat out 1-ups (stations) interlock well in a layout). Effective as both a hand set up and a machine formed carton.

• SST (Standard Straight Tuck) a.k.a parallel tuck-in

Particularly well suited for products requiring a large window in the front display panel - avoids raw edges showing at either end of the primary display panel. Can be set up (erected)by both machine and hand.

• ALB (Auto Lock Bottom)

You can definitely see this in your medicine (syrup) and liquor bottles. Very commonly used to hold fragile and heavy items (glass bottles), where the product weight is concentrated along the longitudinal center line. This is because it offers virtually no chance of the item to drop down while being held along the main panels

• Universal (Overlap Seal End)

Commonly found in Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) products - since they are completely sealed after the product is filled - they offer tamper proof evidence. 

• Snap Lock Bottom

Most easily hand erected and closed. In some places are referred to as '1-2-3 bottom carton' as it takes 3 steps to manually lock the bottom. Used commonly as the bottom closure for a shallow depth, tube style counter display carton.
 

 

An final word (or rather ode!) to folding cartons

In 1946, Emmy Bettendorf - one of the most prolific german soprano - sang in praise about the humble paperboard carton:

"Man could not have achieved his present high level of mental, spiritual and physical welfare without paperboard, for the paperbox today is the vital key to orderly and sanitary transportation and distribution of goods... Without the mass production box, the re would be no mass production...We had move and count things in piles instead of units...And thus out of piles, confusion and dirt of the earlier period came the cleanliness, order, precision and efficiency of mass production goods through the employment of mass production packages of paperboard..."