Consumer Tray Boxes.

A lock-corner tray ships flat and is folded up by hand with tabs locking the corners, while a glued-corner tray has its corners pre-glued for fast erecting. Lock-corner suits smaller runs packed at a bench. Glued-corner gives cleaner walls and quicker setup on a packing line.

If your trays are packed by hand, lock-corner is where we'd start.

Low walls show the product and high walls protect it, so the height follows what the tray has to do. A shallow tray paired with a sleeve displays well, while a deeper tray with a lid holds heavier or more fragile contents.

Go too high and the front hides what's inside. We usually mock up two heights with your product in them before deciding.

Wells are shaped openings in a platform inside the tray, each holding one item in a set position. They turn a loose assortment into an arranged set, which reads as a considered gift.

The well layout follows your assortment map, so the pieces land in the same place in every box. Packing gets faster and checking a finished box gets easier too.

Yes, floor print adds little to the job and becomes the backdrop the customer sees when the sleeve comes off. A pattern, a colour field or a short line of copy under the wells shows through between items.

Outside, the tray is usually printed to pair with its sleeve. For food contents we can use a gloss coated surface that wipes clean.

Trays are measured inside, length by width by wall height, and the sleeve is sized from the tray's outside. Common builds run from 8 x 6 x 1.5 inches to 12 x 9 x 3 inches.

Because the sleeve needs a snug fit over the erected tray, we finalise the tray first and then cut the sleeve from a made-up sample.

The lowest quantity we take on consumer tray boxes is 500. Most buyers order the matching sleeve at the same quantity so the two stay paired in stock.

Assortment packs with different well layouts can share one outer tray size, which keeps a single sleeve design working across the range.

Tray boxes take 7 to 10 business days to produce, and a rush run takes 5 to 7. We can send the tray and sleeve together as samples in 5 to 7 business days, so you can test the fit and the reveal.

The sample fee counts toward the production invoice once you place the order.

For heavier contents we move from paperboard to E-flute, a thin corrugated that still takes a fine print surface. The flute spreads load across the base and stands up to stacking in the stockroom, where full trays sit under other cases.

Food-contact stocks are available for edible contents. Paperboard and E-flute trays both recycle with ordinary cardboard.