Today’s retailer demands continually challenge food manufacturers to innovate and respond to current in-store marketing trends. The pressure often falls to both the manufacturer and its suppliers to develop and implement solutions rapidly.

One such solution, for Bush Brothers & Co., Knoxville, TN, is a club store multipack called the Pantry Vendor™, for its Bush Brothers Baked Beans. The dispenser carton provides a compelling billboard for wraparound graphics that give Bush Brothers pallet displays presence on all four sides—a priority for club stores. In the process, Bush Brothers gets preferred display space in club stores while impulse buying among shoppers.

The eight-pack dispensers replace plastic rings that held cans of beans in a low-wall, shrink-wrapped corrugated tray.

The Solid Unbleached Sulphate coated kraft container, from Graphic Packaging International, contains a dispenser-style opening similar to refrigerator vending packs for beverages. From a retailer perspective, the cartons provide the additional benefit of interlocked stacking to strengthen the structure of the display pallets.

Besides generating a good-looking and a highly functional package, Graphic Packaging also provides the proper machinery and the paperboard to enable Bush Brothers to produce the packaging in-house—and achieve 96% production efficiency.

“We didn’t have a carton in our packaging mix, nor did we have cartoning ability in-house,” says Robby Martin, Bush Brothers Process and Packaging Engineer. “Graphic Packaging developed a package for us and provided us with a very efficient and affordable machine. By running GPI board on a GPI machine, our packs are tighter and our board is lighter in weight. We were able to reduce start-up time and operating costs.”