A Bundaberg Sweet-Potato Washpack Ends the Double-Handle Into Cartons
A Bundaberg sweet-potato washpack in coastal Queensland.
The operation
This is a sweet-potato washpacking operation around Bundaberg in coastal Queensland, taking crop in from bulk field bins, washing and grading it, and dispatching retail-ready packs to supermarket distribution centres. Their throughput is high and their margin is thin, so every extra time a tuber is touched and every disposable carton bought eats directly into the return.
The problem with the old handling
The washpack was double-handling. Product came out of bulk bins, got washed, and was then hand-packed into flimsy single-use cartons for supermarket-ready dispatch. Two problems followed. The cartons couldn't really take the wash moisture still on the tubers, so boxes softened and crushed when cross-stacked on the pallet, damaging the layer below. And every carton was a purchase that went out the door once and never came back, a permanent consumable cost, plus the disposal of erected boxes at the DC end.
Why this crate
They made the BPB-P6416FV their standard retail-ready unit. It is a 600 x 400 x 160 mm folding vented crate, moulded from polypropylene, with a 32-litre capacity and an internal cavity of 570 x 370 x 153 mm. At just 1.62 kg each it's effortless to handle on a pack line, and it's built for ISO returnable-packaging systems, with both cross-stacking and stacking designed in.
The vented walls did two jobs. They let the residual wash moisture keep drying off the tubers in transit instead of trapping it, and, critically, the crate cross-stacks rigidly on the pallet without crushing the layer below, because it's carrying the load through its own structure rather than through a damp cardboard wall. The folding action meant that once the crate is empty at the DC it collapses to a fraction of erected height for the return trip, turning a one-way carton into a returnable that comes back flat.
The rollout
This crate carries a large minimum order (it's a mass-deployment returnable, MOQ in the thousands), so the washpack committed to it as a genuine pool rather than a trial, which suits a high-volume line where you want every dispatch on the same unit. They mapped the crate into their existing pallet pattern, confirmed the cross-stack held without box-collapse on a full pallet, and set up the empty-return flow with their DC so collapsed crates came back on the trucks that would otherwise run empty space.
The result, estimated
The carton saving is the clearest line, framed as an estimate. By replacing single-use boxes with a returnable crate on retail-ready lines, the washpack cut carton purchases by an estimated 25-35% in the first year as the pool displaced disposables, and that saving compounds every season the crates stay in rotation, because a crate amortises over dozens of trips while a carton is spent once.
The freight saving is the second effect. Because the crates fold to a fraction of erected height for backhaul, the empty-return freight bill dropped by an estimated 70% versus shipping rigid boxes back, collapsed crates simply take far less trailer space. There's a quieter quality gain too: ending the wash-moisture-into-cardboard problem removed the crushed-box damage that had been spoiling product on the bottom of the stack, and cut the double-handling of tipping out of bulk bins into boxes. We frame all of these as estimates, the exact percentages depend on trip counts and lane structure, but the pattern is a thinner consumable bill, far cheaper empty returns, and less damaged product.