Improved and reduced packaging has emerged as perhaps the easiest and most effective way to combat soaring transportation costs, especially in the consumer industries.

Over the past year, club store retailers Costco and Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club have been experimenting with a new cylindrical design for milk cartons (taller and narrower) that enables them to load considerably more cartons per trailer – reducing transportation and production expense, and saving customers money as well.

The new design gets rid of the milk crates that have traditionally been used to transport milk, and allows the new containers to be palletized similar to traditional consumer packaged goods.

The idea came from a spin-off of Superior Dairy (Canton, OH), which had spun off a unit called Creative Edge that creates food packaging designs.

The new milk packaging has many benefits:

• More than twice the amount of milk can now be loaded into a trailer. Superior Dairy says it has reduced its delivery frequency to initial retailer customers from 4-5 times per week to just 2.
• It substantially reduces packaging/loading time in the milk plants, reducing production costs
• Retailers can store about three times as much milk in a given store refrigerator, or conversely free up two-thirds of that floor space for something else.

Early adopters are passing some of those savings on to consumers, with prices generally being 10-20 cents lower per gallon versus traditional milk container pricing at Costco and Sam’s.

While some consumers are not wild about the new design, especially with regard to the ease of pouring, that isn’t likely to stand in the way. Sam’s Club, for example, has announced plans for full adoption of the packaging.

"We're estimating it could be up to 11,000 trucks we're reducing on the road this year," said Daniel Book, marketing manager for Sam’s Club.