May 30 2006, 12:01

National corrugated board packing tries to force "banana boxes" out of market

Just in recent years the producers of corrugated board boxes have noticed the actively developing produce market and offered their services. Corrugated board box is an optimal packing solution for transportation, wholesale and small wholesale trade of many vegetables and fruits: tomato, cucumber, egg-plant, pepper, apple, peach, berries, etc. Corrugated cardboard can often effectively replace net bags, wooden boxes and other types of packing for potato, carrot, cabbage, red beets.

"When you visit any wholesale produce market, you will see half of produce packed into corrugated board boxes. But you will be really lucky to find boxes of Ukrainian origin", - Maxim Yenchenko says, the Market Information Specialist of the Agricultural Marketing Project. Though the price for national corrugated board box has been able to compete with the imported product price for a long time (and the quality is sometimes even better), many vendors still apply used "banana" boxes. Of course, used "banana" box is 2-3 times cheaper than new Ukrainian box, but it certainly has a number of disadvantages. Banana box does not possess the information about the supplier (advertisement); the size of it does not permit the suppliers use the transport area effectively; banana box look does not appeal to the consumer, and its rigidity is much lower. It is often not feasible to apply used imported corrugated board boxes: vendors just got used to do it. The specialist is sure that it is time to attract attention to the products of national manufacturers.

According to the assessments done by Maxim Yenchenko, the potential market volume for packing Ukrainian fruits and vegetables into corrugated board boxes is around 10-15 mln. boxes a year. The market can potentially grow. National producers manufacture now only an insignificant part of corrugated board boxes really required by fruit and vegetable market.

There is a quite large number of enterprises - producers of corrugated board boxes operating now in the country. The largest producers are Rubezhanskiy cardboard plant, Kyiv cardboard-paper plant ("OSNOVA" Concern), DUNAPACK-Ukraine LLC.

According to information provided to "Agrooglyad: Vegetables and Fruits" journal by the managers of DUNAPACK-Ukraine enterprise in Lviv oblast, the demand for corrugated board boxes has increased much from the side of fruit and vegetable market. But, the demand started to grow from the zero level, so the production volumes are still insignificant. DUNAPACK-Ukraine company produces three-layer and five-layer corrugated board boxes of different size for the purposes of vegetables, fruits and berries transportation. The enterprise is closely cooperating with the private farms in central and southern regions of Ukraine (the company representative office is also working in Kherson oblast). The enterprise supplies boxes for packing mushrooms, strawberry, cherry and sour cherry, apples, pepper, tomatoes, etc. The producers consider individual requests during the process of layout development. The boxes are manufactured within 10 days after the clients' order has been accepted.