We have been using a custom box made by Star pizza box for about 3 years now. I think they are very valuable in our branding and we are looking to give them a new look. When I reached out to our distributor PFG/Roma they basically said that the only box maker who is working smaller accounts is Star. While I know we are not Papa Johns, between our two stores we move about 500 cases a month (four different sizes.)
According to them Whalen, RockTenn/Westrock are not interested in accounts of our size. The idea of not having a competitive bid process makes me crazy.
Is your concern related to the price that you are paying for your pizza boxes? If so, find out what other suppliers carry star pizza box. This happened with us and we were able to cut the price of our boxes by about 15-20% by getting a price from anther supplier. Same boxes, just brought in another way. I know that GFS and SOFO foods both work with Star box.
Since you are in Texas i’d give Joe at lisanti a call. See what he can do. They got our box business a few years back. Way cheaper than Sysco/Roma at our quantities for the same box with custom print.
I am just looking to get the best price possible while still meeting our box requirements & quality. I know Joe & will give him a call. Does anyone know of any other box companies that could be an option?
What do you guys pay for custom boxes? Right now we’re paying around $14 for 14"white generic ones and around $18 for the 16". I’ve seen at Restaurant Depot for several dollars less for the Brown generic type box. I’m sure amount ordered has a lot to do with it. But wondering how much for a 14" and 16" box would be more or less. It’s definitely something I would love to do in the future. For brand recognition, I think its super critical.
We do not use a custom printed box. I have looked at it several times over the years but keep coming back to the same thing: We put a full color box topper on every box we send out. This costs us a few cents each and includes several special offers as well as our name and phone info etc… If we did a custom box this would be attached right on top of the graphic… so why bother? The box topper is likely to be kept, includes more information, can be changed often and is cheaper.
We pay $30.73 for a bundle of 50 16" custom boxes. They’re digitally printed, so there’s no setup fees and can be changed after each run if we want. They make them in runs of 1,000 and our supplier warehouses them for us. Then we order them weekly by the bundle as needed along with our other supplies. (We are a low volume store compared to most of you guys.) I’ve been happy with them and they worked out to only a few bucks more per bundle than the generic ones we were already using.
I agree with bodegahwy, that just using a rotational box topper on a cheaper plain box is the way to go due to reasons he mentioned. For our situation though, it didn’t really work. Again, we are pretty low volume. Unless it’s a large catering order, I just fold my boxes per order as I don’t have convenient storage space for a lot of folded boxes. It was too much to do per pizza as I was boxing them.
That’s a really high price. Have you shopped that? Even if you only use 10 boxes per night the upcharge on that price comes to $1000 per year. Do you have more than one purveyor? Have you shopped that price?