'Green' pack sweetens deal

Green' pack sweetens deal

“We have looked for years to be environmentally appropriate and yet not have broken glass in our honey, but it's been enormously difficult to find the right packaging,” admits VIHC owner Richard Spiegel.

A small company, VIHC didn't have the money to spend on developing custom shipping containers or importing bulk loose fill from the mainland to the Big Island. However, with high-end clients such as Neiman Marcus, VIHC couldn't afford using sub par packaging.

The company chose to use different types of cushioning materials in its shipping cases to ensure the jars of high-density honey didn't shatter in-transit. VIHC also included a letter with the shipments, urging customers to recycle the inner packing whenever possible. It developed packaging solutions for the smaller shipments of honey using only paperboard, but faced a bigger challenge with cases of mixed shipments of 8- and 20-oz jars.

“With a combination of different-size products, there's a likelihood that they will shift around in the package and get damaged or damage the box,” says Dennis Salazar, president of Salazar Packaging. “You can imagine what happens to a case of honey when one jar breaks.”

Green' pack sweetens deal 2

Simple and attractive

The inner packing is simple and esthetically pleasing, which is important to VIHC because of the high-end stores at which it sells the rare honey. The packaging will cost about 15 percent more than the former cushioning VIHC used, but Spiegel insists that it's worth it. “It's a long time and a lot of money for a little company to spend on research,” he says. “But we're trying to live up to what people are talking about: Green.” Spiegel was excited about the eco-friendly cushioning, but was adamant to perfect the products while staying true to an environmentally conscious philosophy.