Don’t get caught out by the simplest errors when choosing your packing material. You can even turn it into a low cost marketing win your customers will love.
What is void fill?
Anything that fills the void between your product and your shipping box is void fill. Packing peanuts, shredded paper, bubble wrap etc. It’s all void fill and provides cushioning for your product.
The first thing to work out is, do you need it?
If your product sits tight against the sides of your shipping box, then you don’t have room for void fill. This is good for biscuits and cookies to stop them rattling around, but doesn’t provide any protection from knocks and drops during shipping. My individually wrapped biscuits in a letterbox size box didn’t need any void fill. They were a crunchy biscuit with royal icing and shipped worldwide without damage.
Without the icing they were fragile and easily shattered, so the plain shortbread always gets void fill. It also protects the retail packaging box. As a gift product I have to ensure the inner box looks as good as the product, as they’re given away.
Types of Void Fill
There’s a whole range of void fill options, and even manual and automatic dispensers, but what do you need to get started?
How delicate is your product?
If your products are fragile, prone to shattering, or chipping around the edges, then you’ll need layers of protection. Basically, air is bad. Air between your product and it’s food safe wrapping is bad for shelf life and leaves room for your product to bounce around inside the box.
Air between your food safe wrap and your retail box is bad because the product can bounce around inside. Air between your retail box and your shipping box is bad, you get the idea. Make your inner wrap snug, your retail box snug and fill the space between your retail box and your shipping box with padding, i.e. void fill.
Worst case scenario, your product is super delicate. Even shortbread that won’t break in the post is fragile if you sell it in glass jars. Those jars are hard, so you’ll need your shortbread well packed inside the jar, and the jar itself will need packed away from the shipping container sides.
Void Fill Form
Void fill comes in a variety of materials, lengths, ease of use and so on. To make your life easy, I’ve compiled a table below of some of the most common types and my experience with them.
| Name/Brand Name | Form | Ease of Use Out of 5 | Low Mess Out of 5 | Price p/100m or 10kg for loose fill (Apr 2023) | Climate Friendly Out of 5 |
| BubbleWrap® | Trapped air bubbles on a roll of plastic sheeting or premade bags | 3 | 5 | £110 | 1 |
| Paper | On a roll | 4 | 4 | £15 | 5 |
| Shredded Paper | Compressed in a box | 4 | 1 | £42 | 4 |
| Wood Wool | Compressed in a box | 3 | 0 | £42 | 5 |
| Corrugated Paper | On a roll | 4 | 4 | £50 | 4 |
| Tissue Paper | Sheets, on a roll or shredded | 4 | 4 | £200 | 4 |
| Crepe Paper | On a roll | 3 | 4 | £9 | 4 |
| Loose Fill | Packing peanuts, foam chips, | 4 | 3 | £30 | 1 |
| Air Bags | Plastic bags of air on a roll | 3 | 5 | £29 | 2 |
| Name/Brand Name | Form | Ease of Use Out of 5 | Low Mess Out of 5 | Price p/100m or 10kg for loose fill (Apr 2023) | Climate Friendly Out of 5 |
Creative Void Fill
Packing material doesn’t have to be boring. Some brands even turn it into an added feature. If you post worldwide, it can be really interesting to read the newspapers of foreign countries, especially if you send products to diaspora from your own country.
Crumpling up recent newspapers makes great void fill and can be bought cheaply, especially if you stock up at the weekend with the big Sunday papers and their collection of supplements.
Another way is to make your own. A shredding machine will turn paper and cardboard into shredded paper you can reuse. Market this as one of your green credentials, reusing materials. My own customers frequently get a mix of packing materials, depending on what I received in deliveries to the house and office.
Don’t Forget…
One easy item to overlook when ordering void fill is storage space. 10kg of packing foam chips looks small on a website. It takes up a ton of room in your house. If you’re looking at expanding in the future, think about dispensers. Commercial paper roll dispensers can be a box on a desk or 2 metres tall and take up floor space. Or you can make one from parts in Ikea or B&Q and fit it under a desk. Be creative, but plan ahead. After 3 years I’m still using up a very messy box of wood wool after buying it in bulk on offer.