When it comes to pharmaceuticals, you can never be too careful in terms of shipping, especially when it comes to transporting medicine over long Interstate distances. That’s the premise that a whole specialized transportation industry has been developed around. At any moment of the day in North America, cargo trucks with specific, temperature-controlled semi-trailers are hauling several metric tons of pharmaceuticals from factory-floor to drugstore counter. The reason for these trucks being meticulously temperature-controlled is on account of the medicine they carry. Even the most innocuous, over-the-counter drugs can be rendered ineffective (or worse)
if they are exposed to too much heat during the course of shipment.
Pharmaceutical packaging and partitioning are themselves essential parts of ensuring product quality. The key to designing packaging and partitioning for pharmaceuticals is making sure they are insulated properly. Without the right level of insulation – especially when it comes to interior partitioning and layer padding – the corrugated containers being transported can soak up an excess amount of heat. If that happens, then the drugs are most often rendered forfeit, and both drugstore and drug manufacturer lose a huge amount of profit.
At M&M Box Partitions, we provide customized die-cut insert and layer padding for the pharmaceutical industry. With a host of different types of paper for inserts and layering, we guarantee that our products will protect yours with the utmost care and deliberation.
Chipboard Stages a Retro-Revival for Itself
The humble and omnipresent material known as “chipboard,” or “particle board,” is making a comeback for itself in some unlikely, even fashionable, venues. Used in packaging and package partitioning since its inception (chipboard is one of the primary materials we use in our box partitioning here at M & M), as well as in scrapbooking and frame-building, chipboard is “making a comeback” as a vintage means of decorating everything from corporate office spaces to Brooklyn, Chicago, and East End London dive bars.
Google’s new research campus in London, for instance, relies heavily on chipboard for its new wall design. The chipboard is supposed to project a raw, urban, and grittily trend-setting image for the giant computer company. 
Since a vast number of Google’s employees are in their 20s and 30s, this atmosphere has been built in hopes of being “inspirational” to those who work there.
Additionally, chipboard is staging a retro-revival for itself in other urban settings, such as in trendy restaurants and bars. The Alibi, one of East London’s current hottest dance venues, is essentially a dive bar with walls entirely made of chipboard. In America, it’s catching on as well. Within our own Chicago city limits, one can see “chipboard chic” alive and well at new restaurants and pubs in Bucktown, Ukrainian Village, and Wicker Park. In Brooklyn, as well, the Williamsburg, East Williamsburg, and Bushwick neighborhoods have all developed a love for party-friendly particle board.
All of this is, of course, a passing phenomenon. Chipboard will continue to drive the packaging and partitioning industries in America and throughout the world. But as a reflection of the still considerable might (and storied history) of concentrated industry in cities, the grit and urban associative-ness of chipboard will continue to thrive, regardless of how it’s packaged.
Milk Carton Stock: Ideal for Food Package Partitioning
It wasn’t too long ago – certainly within the scope of many of our lifetimes – when milk was delivered each morning at your doorstep by means of a glass or a metal bottle. There was no better solution or more convenient way of storage. Milk had to be delivered daily; otherwise the milk would spoil overnight. It was just an accepted fact of daily city and suburban life. The milkman on his morning rounds about the neighborhood was as stereotypical a fixture of American life as was, say, the paperboy on his morning paper-route (that is, until the mid-2000s when digital newspapers caught on).
But all of a sudden, almost as if overnight, something changed. What technological development happened that sent the milkman the way of the dinosaur? It all can be traced back to 1933, 
when the first paper milk carton was produced in the United States. The original makers of the “milk carton” fortified their paperboard with wax in order to seal it against leakage and deterioration. Up to an extent, the concept worked, but it wasn’t until the 1940s when milk carton board became better popularized.
What led to its popularization was when American diary packagers introduced polyethylene into the paperboard for added strength and waterproofing. While this happened in the 1940s, it took many years for the country to come to its good senses and adopt a technology that was better for carrying milk, and that could, with the help of effective refrigeration, keep milk from spoilage for days on end.
Today milk carton board is used for many other things beyond milk cartons. M&M Partitions uses milk carton paperboard for portioning food and beverage products that are prone to leakage or spillage. That way, if a package gets accidentally overturned or mishandled, the damage to its contents are relegated to a few sections of the box, and won’t tend to flood the whole container.
SBS Partitioning and its Use for Pharmaceutical Packaging
One of the steady workhorses for our company in recent years is our partition work on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. With the minute number of bottles, boxes, pillboxes, and various containers that pharmaceuticals require when being shipped, and given the fact that profit margins from major US and European drug companies continues to soar, it’s small wonder that so much of our business comes from medicine and OEM medical device packaging. 
One of the main reasons companies trust us to provide partitions for their products is our mastery of SBS partition building.
SBS, otherwise known as solid bleached sulfate, is the ideal partition material for pharmaceutical shipping. Comprised of premium paperboard, coated with a thin layer of kaolin clay to better its printing surface legibility, and oftentimes additionally coated with polyethylene resin in order to protect against costly spillage and product spoilage damages; SBS partitioning keeps medical bottles and containers protected, neatly organized, and well-labeled throughout the rigors of transport and handling.
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.
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.
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.”
