Category Archive: Uncategorized

Our Work with Poly-Coated Partitioning Material

At M & M Box Partitions, we have extensive experience in all kinds of partition materials. Oftentimes, we get customers who aren’t fully sure of what they’re looking for in terms of the right kind of partition for their packaging. They know all the necessary dimensions, and have a good grasp of the pricing, but they aren’t always up on the exact kind of partitioning material that best suits their products. On that note, we thought it might be helpful to write a series of blogs that detail some of the types of partitioning materials we carry, and their best common uses.

For today’s entry we wanted to focus mainly on poly-coated partitioning material. Poly-coated material is prized for a number of properties, primarily its resistance to scuffing, water, and grease. These qualities not only make poly-coating material good for long-distance transportation of small containers of liquids and oils, but also make it ideal for use in delivering industrial components that inevitably have a certain amount of residual grease on their just-fabricated surfaces; components such as bolts, ball bearings, and screws are all perfect for this kind of partitioning.

We stock poly-coated partitioning at our facility here in Chicago in a number of sizes, ranging anywhere from .016” – .125” thickness. For more information about our partitioning products, feel free to contact us at 800-992-3557, or continue browsing our website.

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Partitioning: an Overview of the Process

What are the best procedures to follow when providing box partitioning for a particular client? Since our founding in 1968, we’ve done our fair share of business with all different kinds of boxing and packaging companies. We’re familiar with a wide range of particularities and protocols when it comes to supplying individual clients with the partitioning they need. But 40+ years in the business have taught us a thing or two about how best to streamline the process, and that’s the subject of this week’s blog.

Whether a box-maker or product specialist simply gives us the total dimensions of the shipping container, along with the total number of products they desire to be shipped in each container, or whether they send us the actual box itself, our procedure happens generally as follows:  when making the partitioning, we follow the same guidelines as a box-maker would when designing a box. We ask all the same questions: what is the size and shape of the customer’s product? How resilient and/or fragile is the material from which the product is constructed? If it’s corrugated partitioning that a client is requesting, then what particular corrugated flute dimensions are required?

The fact that we specialize in partitioning allows us the considerable advantage of having consistent familiarity not only with the sum total volume inside a container, but also of the possible sub-divisions that comprise it. Generally, after receiving an order, we follow a procedure where we cut, slot, and assemble the partitioning that the customer has in mind. As can be found on our website, we apply a rule of thumb in determining cell-size by measuring outwards from the cell’s center. Then, if it’s fiberboard partitioning we’re assembling, we allow for 1/16” in leeway per cell-space. Otherwise, if it’s corrugated board we’re using, we generally allow for 3/16” in leeway.

As long as our customers have an established track-record, we’re comfortable doing business with both packaging/shipping companies and with manufacturers alike. The fact that we specialize in what we do lets us focus minutely on the exact procedures of what we do. We’re not a one-stop-shop shipping company; we’re experts in a particular field of a vast industry. We tend to think not merely in terms of bulk space alone; we bear in mind the spaces in between.

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It’s Official: the Packaging Industry Is Starting to Pick Itself Up

It’s an uncontested fact that the packaging industry is one of the leading indicators of the state of an economy. Since the approximate number of packages traveling by rail, freight, ship, or plane can readily be compiled any given month, the resulting figure can offer a healthy metric as to how many customers are making purchases both domestically and abroad, and how many manufacturers and distributors are supplying product to their customers.

Now as to the state of the American economy… that’s a somewhat more highly contested fact depending on your viewpoint and whom you listen to. While we at M & M Box Partitions can certainly appreciate that the American economy has a hard road ahead of itself in terms of recovery, we can also attest that the new numbers don’t lie: orders for our custom partitioning are up.

For example, we’re seeing much larger volumes of orders from the hardware packaging industry. Those who package the locks, hinges, and handles for windows and doorframes have been jostling for our business. For a country that’s still in the throes of recovering from the housing bubble crash, the greater demand for home-building hardware can only mean a good thing. 

Food packaging orders are also on the rise. In particular we seem to be getting a tremendous amount of traffic from the confectionery industry. If this were still December, we might be able to chalk up this increase in traffic to the holidays, and to all those who require chocolates, pralines, and assorted sweets for their holiday parties. But this isn’t December, this is January, America. The orders for gourmet products keep coming. Could this mean that people in the States these days are willing to spend more money on luxuries and not simply necessities? While we as yet have to perform any statistical research in tandem with the University of Chicago’s School of Economics, all we can point to are our own numbers: the rising orders for box partitioning.

Pharmaceutical and cosmetics packaging orders are picking up as well. In short, major American industries are looking more and more to our customized partitioning solutions and products for their shipment orders. Whether this is some actual indicator that the US economy is finally picking up its “spilled packages,” all we can offer is this maxim of our own design: “As goes partitioning, so goes packaging; as goes packaging, so goes the economy.”

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We Make Our Partitions Using 100% Post-Consumer Waste

A lot of North American consumers don’t as yet know the difference between pre-consumer and post-consumer recycled materials. The most singular difference between the two types of material is their ease of implementation in developing fresh products. Pre-consumer waste is usually a lot easier to “mix in” when designing products made from recycling. For example, think of the wood-chips that get left behind after a tree’s been put through the ringer in a sawmill. Those wood chips would make for ideal packaging material for boxes, wouldn’t they?

Not always the case with post-consumer packaging. Post-consumer material is essentially comprised of old newspapers and magazines, crusty milk cartons, soggy shredded bits of cardboard, and – to be sure– the endless reams of shredded paper that companies bundle up by the bushel-load and dump into industrial bins at the end of each business day. It all adds up. And it’s a lot more of an involved process to rehabilitate shredded newspaper into “something new” than it is with simple wood chips.

That’s all fine and good, but that leads to massive accumulation of post-consumer waste products in giant garbage dumps across the world. It seems a pity that more of those flattened Coca-Cola cups and used Big Mac containers can’t find themselves another use beyond mere “turkey stuffing” in landfills.

That’s why we at M & M Box Partitions make it a deliberate policy to manufacture our paperboard partitions out of 100% post-consumer recyclable material. It’s our way of leading the way. We make it our business to demonstrate to other companies that you can re-use other’s waste for the sake of a greener environment, and still make quality packaging and partitioning. Which is exactly what we do here at M & M.

It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.

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M & M Box Gives You the New Year’s Eve Survival Guide

If you’re like tens of millions of other Americans, you’re probably more than halfway through your Christmas shopping by now. Maybe you’ve already bought everything you need for Christmas on Black Friday, or Cyber Monday, and you’re 100% finished. Two weeks to go and you’ve already got it all covered, right? It’s time now to breathe free and easy, rest easy on your Christmas wreath, and maybe polish up on those caroling skills, right?

Wrong.

Three words for you: “Happy New Year.”

Yes, late December can feel a little like rush-hour when it comes to celebrating. Just when you think you’ve out-done yourself for all time; that you’ve gone the extra mile and bought everybody else exactly what they wanted for Christmas this year; that you’ve successfully digested the turkey, the Yorkshire pudding, and the umpteenth pumpkin pie; that you’ve dodged all the traffic and successfully seen your in-laws off to the airport for still another year – wham – here comes another major national holiday.

Luckily, M & M has a word for the wise in surviving this next major yuletide onslaught. And the word is “champagne.” Or “sparkling wine” if you want two words.

Whichever the case, if you want enough bubbly to go around for the party, you’re going to want boxes of it. It saves you the time of having to go out to the specialty store and individually select your bottles. And let’s not forget either that it can be more economical to buy in bulk. The one critical component you can’t forget when carrying champagne (or sparkling wine) in bulk is – of course – having the right partitions in your box. We recommend die-cut inserts for your boxes so that the bottles fit just right, and don’t clink against one another. We also recommend layer padding for much the same reasons. Remember, champagne is your lifeline out of the holidays and back into normality. Treat your champagne bottles right and guard them against breakage. Happy holidays!

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Happy Boxing Day

There isn’t any relation that we’re aware of between Boxing Day and the kind of boxing that we do here at M & M Box Partitions. But there is a certain time (usually around the holidays) where you begin to feel like maybe they should go ahead and make every day into “Boxing Day” up through New Year’s. What with all the gift-wrapping, the present-sending, and last minute Web-searching on Amazon that goes into a typical holiday season, one can begin to feel as though one was living out of a box.

The key to making one’s holiday boxing easier? Divide and conquer. M & M Box Partitions has been in this business much too long not to recognize the essential need for businesses to organize and carefully compose their holiday shipments by way of box partitioning. That way nothing gets broken or lost, and no angry customers come yammering your way on your inquiry line come Christmas Eve.

We specialize in any number of high quality styles of box partitioning. Whether your business needs smaller, more intricate partitions to accommodate your shipments of chocolate and Christmas tree ornaments this season, or whether you’re in the sparkling wine or champagne industry and are in the process of battening down the corks in preparation for New Year’s, M & M Box Partitions has a fit for all your boxing needs.

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