About Vita Coco
Vita Coco has created a new market in the non-carbonated beverage business and redefined the alternative sports beverage category with their exciting range of natural coconut water. They have become one of the fastest growing lifestyle beverages in North America and Europe.
Background Packaging Issues.
Vita Coco is utilising many different channels to service consumer demand for their beverages, particularly through online e-commerce. To satisfy stringent quality demands of several e-tailers, Vita Coco products need their packaged products to pass both drop testing and crash testing to ensure pack integrity during transit. Unfortunately, Vita Coco was failing to meet the required standard to pass these tests, with juice cartons leaking after one or two drops.
Our Analysis
Our design team at StorePAK Corrugated analysed the current packaging design to see how we could improve Vita Coco cartons to meet the required standard. This analysis produced two potential solutions. The first one, to simply increase the board grade, may have mitigated the problem but this wasn’t economic. The second solution was to redesign the internal divisions ensuring minimal movement of the juice bottles inside. Larger buffers were created between the division edge and the outer carton, creating a larger air gap for increased protection. This process was replicated using a die cut pad top and bottom, once again increasing the air gap between the juice bottles and the outer carton, vastly improving how the pack would absorb energy on impact. Finally, we specified a small enhancement of the fluting grade used within the C-Flute board to increase rigidity.
The End Result
To make sure our new designs would meet the required standard, prototypes were produced and submitted for testing. The new packaging passed both the drop test and the impact test at the first attempt and are now currently in production.