Food Packaging For Restaurants The HEB Way

The pandemic resulted in an instant shutdown of many businesses. The non-essential food industry, in particular, received a significant hit, as most of the businesses had to remain shut for weeks or months. Among various other types of businesses in the food industry, restaurants had to endure huge losses.

Restaurants had to remain shut for the initial few weeks of the pandemic. Then various states started staged reopening of those restaurants. With too many restrictions in place, it was hard for most of the restaurants to cover losses incurred during the first few weeks of the pandemic.

Even after reopening, most restaurants and eateries had to work in a limited capacity to comply with their respective state laws, which meant overall decreased attendance.

With most of the regular customers of restaurants choosing to stay at home and cook meals rather than going out, most of the supermarkets experienced a significant boost in sales. People started purchasing food items and toiletries quite rapidly, which resulted in a dramatic rise in demand.

This overall scenario resulted in significant growth in sales of frozen foods and pre-cooked meals. Keeping these demands into consideration, most of the supermarkets had to stock up these in-demand food items.

The story was no different for HEB supermarkets. They were more than happy to meet rising demands, but they also took notice of restaurants that suffered losses due to the pandemic.

A brief history of HEB supermarkets

HEB supermarkets form a large chain of supermarkets, whose headquarter is located in San Antonio. This chain of restaurants has spread to 340 locations throughout Texas and Northern Mexico. This chain of supermarkets started in 1905 when Florence Butt used her $60 of life savings to open a storefront in a small town of Texas.

This business opened its first supermarket after years of consistent hard work in 1942. This supermarket was named HEB.

This business kept up with steady growth over the decades. In 1984, they started a food bank program, which dealt with the donation of unsold, salvageable foods across different market areas.

In 2020, it was HEB that took initiative to help restaurants in the state by providing them with food selling options to help their finances.

Packaging foods for local restaurants

Even though HEB continued to see rising growth in their business, they didn’t forget about the troubles their fellow in the restaurant industry were experiencing. So they reached out to those businesses and offered partnerships to help them during these testing times. They asked those restaurants to prepare foods, which the HEB would package and sell to the customers.

The best thing about this partnership was that they offered those restaurants 100% of the profit.

Their method included packaging of those foods in carded packaging, displaying them in coolers or other display cases with complete instructions about how to make the food items ready to eat, and also notifying customers about the source businesses preparing those foods.

HEB business, in this entire scenario, is not just to package foods, but it has been to help struggling businesses to prevent them from going down. This approach also sets an example of how to earn profits by helping others and build a more cooperative environment.

 

Don't Let Boxes Stand In Your Way

One of the things I have seen take off this year is eCommerce.  They are shipping items more and faster than ever all across the country and it is because businesses have been forced to adapt.  The shutting down of much of the United States Economy and the forced purchasing from online or nowhere has really made an impact on how we shop.  I personally have made over double the purchases I normally do online in a given year and I see that percentage increasing as time goes by.  The fact is though that I am also receiving a crazy amount of boxes in my home each and every week and I am having trouble getting rid of them.  They are simply in the way and I want to talk about ways I have been able to get them out of my life. 

 

I do want to say right up front that I think the idea of not recycling all of these boxes is really just bad for us all.  Not only will the cost of shipping increase but likely the landfills and sustainability of the industry will be limited unless we as a whole actually make a difference in the amount of cardboard used on a daily basis in this country.  I think it is a wise choice to recycle and with the quantity of boxes we are getting in I think it is a moral thing to do as well.

 

But either way, you have to get them out of your domicile and into the trash or recycling.  This is much easier said than done and as of a few years ago I would have thought this was all a joke.  But a few months ago I looked in my garage and the boxes had piled in the corner to the ceiling because I couldn't get them in the trash each week.  I am not one to tear a box down with my bare hands so I found I could only toss away a few each month into the cans provided for me.  My recycling can is not large and with my city I only get one.  I had to find unique ways for my small framed body to get rid of all these packaging supplies in a safe and good manner.

What I found was simply that cutting the boxes to fit the shapes of the can best was the way to go.  WIth me getting 10 to 15 sets of packagingsupplies and boxes in each week I needed to find a good way to eliminate them without hurting myself and especially my hands.  Scissors was just not a good idea and caused blisters and I am not able to tear them down so I ended up with a knife. It sounds like a Halloween movie but in the end, this choice was the wisest and most efficient with my time. 

 

I found a good fixed bladed knife and went about cutting the boxes into pieces.  I always cut away from myself and used gloves.  I kept a sharpener nearby so I could sharpen the blade if it got too dull.  That allowed me to be safer because I was not over pressuring cuts.  I got all the boxes into teh can each week from that point out. So give this method a try and I think you will not be dissapointed.

How To Start an ECommerce Business In 2021

So you want to start a business online huh? Well, you aren’t anything special. In fact, eCommerce has become a very popular and lucrative business trend in the past few years. We’ve seen unprecedented levels of success in recent years with people starting small businesses completely online. There are a lot of benefits that come from operating a business over the internet, but it comes with it’s own risks and complications as well. I have seen a lot of different business trends come and go over the years, but I think that eCommerce is genuinely the future of business and of our markets today. Let’s face it, the world is just moving in a direction that we can’t stop - so what other choice can we make than to adapt to it? That’s what millions of business owners are realizing as they try to adapt their current business model to fit into a more eCommerce based template. I hope this article can help you in your struggle to start an eCommerce business, because you are definitely going to need to learn a few things in order to be successful in the online world.

The first thing that you are going to need to do when starting your eCommerce business is to find your niche. Your niche is going to be your small market segment that you are going to be filling with your business. Some niches are way over saturated with way too many sellers. These are going to be niches that you need to avoid if at all possible. When trying to find your niche, start looking at other online businesses and seeing the things that they are doing right and the things that they are doing wrong. See how businesses in that niche are reaching their customers, and if they are doing it effectively. Another thing to keep in mind is the product that you are going to be selling, because this will also help you better define your niche. For example, if you sell candles that are made from recycled glass jars and use only soy wax, then your niche might be within people who care about sustainability and are regularly buying home decor and amenities. That is just a small example and may not be helpful for your business specifically, but hopefully it can give you a better understanding of what a niche market might look like.

This process involves a lot of heavy research and looking into specific models and historical data of your potential competitors, so it honestly may not be the most enjoyable type of work. Just keep in mind that all the work you do is going to be very important for your next steps in creating your eCommerce business.

I also want to briefly mention that you need to figure out what you are selling because this will determine your other operating costs. What I mean by this is that if you are selling a digital product, you don’t have to worry about shipping your goods. However, a physical product requires some serious investments in packing supplies and packaging materials. You want to make sure that you are using effective packing materials when you ship your products to your customers in order to make sure that they continue to come back to you after receiving their product in one piece.

Are Boxes and Tape Hurting Your Company?

It is always interesting to see what ways companies to survive and thrive.  It has been a topic written about and professed on for centuries and lately, it has been the smaller things instead of corporate structure that have saved companies from going under.  The simple fact is that with many companies transitioning into eCommerce business in 2020 that the little things like where you are getting your packaging supplies from is ending up being the difference in surviving and going bankrupt.  This is why I think this topic is so important and maybe vital in keeping your companies shipping department thriving and giving you a competitive advantage.  But what are the things to look for in your company and what types of products may cause such a huge shift in profitability.  I plan on going over just a few here today and hope to give you an idea of the things you should be looking at to stay ahead of the business game this year.

 

The first thing you need to really think about is your shipping department.  This is the area that will most likely make or break your margins and allow you to keep inventory in or get extra marketing out of your current cash.  The fact is that now every single item you sell will have to be shipped and if you are not keeping your shipping department moving and operating at peak performance then you are losing out.  One area we found in our company was that the simple process of taping our boxes changed our budget drastically.

 

Normally we purchased all of our packaging supplies from Amazon and just ended up using regular tape.  Some of our packages would spend 10 to 15 strips of packing tape on each box going out.  We really didn't think much of it but we saw that any returns we received happened to be on boxes that only got 3 to 5 pieces of tape.  So we talked with the packer who always overpacked and he knew that the weight of the items in those boxes was too much for the tape we were using.  This led me to start calling around to major companies in the box world to see what was going on.

 

I talked with the customer service team of a huge online-only company and they talked about different packing tapes and the thicknesses and even gum tape.  The thought of these different tapes never crossed our minds.  They were more expensive and after we went through our product weight and shape and the boxes we were using they made a suggestion.  They suggested we try this thicker more expensive tape but only to use one strip per side.  They swore up and down it would hold and be even stronger than 15 strips.  They did the math and we would save about 35% of the cost with one strip per side and the machine that cut it to the direct length of the box would increase speed by 60%.  These were big boasts, but this company had done this thousands of times and proven the math and they were right. 

We trained our team in one day and told them only to use one piece per side.  They liked the quickness and were skeptical.  But we ended up packing almost twice as many items that day and saved 35% in tape costs. That was a competitive advantage and it is awesome.