Winner at the 2026 WorldStar Awards
Award-winning packaging for big bottles: Cutting costs and carbon
Safely transporting 10L bottles with less material, less costs, and reduced carbon.
Transporting 10-liter bottles of cooking oil securely is critical to ensuring products arrive intact and on time. Smurfit Westrock addressed this challenge with the Hol(e)y Tray, an innovative interlocking divider system designed to stabilize pallets while reducing material use, costs and environmental impact
The Challenge
The customer needed a packaging solution that would prevent pallet collapse during transport without adding complexity, excess material or handling time. Existing designs relied on heavy board grades, multiple support columns and inefficient packing processes that increased costs, storage demands and the risk of load failure
The Approach
Smurfit Westrock developed the Hol(e)y Tray, a smartly engineered divider featuring precision-cut holes that allow 10-liter bottles to interlock and stabilize one another on the pallet. The design enabled a shift from BC to thinner EB flute, simplified the overall structure, and reduced internal supports from six square columns to four rectangular corner columns, improving transport stability while cutting material use. Thinner dividers also optimized warehouse storage and reduced empty packaging transport.
The Result
The new solution delivered a stronger, more stable pallet while cutting handling steps by 27% and reducing packaging costs by 9.1%, resulting in annual savings of €69,300. Warehouse space requirements fell by 40%, eliminating 13 truck journeys per year. Compared with the previous solution, material optimization and transport efficiencies reduced the customer’s carbon footprint by 43 tonnes of CO₂. With zero complaints of collapsed loads and improved ergonomics enabled by automation, the Hol(e)y Tray demonstrates how smarter design can simultaneously enhance performance, efficiency, and sustainability.
Products used by this client
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