‍Leaving Wax: The Questions Growers Actually Ask

A conversation with Plastpac, a New Jersey manufacturer of single polymer produce boxes.

By David Marinac, Specialized Packaging Marketplace

Wax coated corrugated has been the default produce shipping carton for forty to fifty years. In that time nobody has published a serious defense of it, and nobody has published a serious set of answers about what replaces it. There is no wax trade body writing content. There is no comparison anyone trusts. Growers are left to work it out from whatever a salesperson last told them.

So we did the obvious thing and asked a manufacturer to sit down and answer the questions growers ask before they switch. Not the questions a marketing department wishes they would ask. The real ones, including the ones about price, where the answer is not flattering.

Plastpac manufactures single polymer corrugated shipping containers in Kenilworth, New Jersey. The answers below are theirs. The notes in between are ours.

WHY THIS PAGE EXISTS  An unclaimed category is not the same as a settled one. Wax is still the volume incumbent in produce, and it is losing ground quietly, without anyone writing down why. That gap is the reason a grower asking a reasonable question in 2026 cannot find a straight answer anywhere.

TRYING IT, AND GETTING STARTED

Can I try the boxes before committing to a truckload?

Yes. If it is a size we already stock, we will pull fifty to a hundred and fifty pieces and send them at no charge. That is enough to assemble a pallet, load it with real product, and put it through your actual cooler and your actual trucks. Rip one apart if you want. We would rather you abuse a sample than take our word for anything.

What is the minimum order?

One truckload. Depending on box size that runs roughly twenty thousand to forty thousand boxes, most commonly around twenty five thousand. A load is usually a single size. Boxes ship flat, so a full pallet of boxes makes up close to a truckload of finished produce.

What do you need to know before you can quote me?

What you are packing and how much weight goes in the box. The size you use now and how many you go through. Who you buy from today. When your season runs. How many locations you ship to. And whether you need boxes now or are planning ahead.

When is the right time of year to be talking to a box supplier?

Before your season, or between seasons. Once you are in season you already know where your boxes are coming from and you do not have twenty minutes to look at a new one. The end of a season works too, because there is usually still time to get a trial order in and see how it runs before you commit for next year.

What is your standard lead time?

It depends on the time of the year, your particular needs, whether it is a stock size or custom, printed or plan. Tell what what you need, we'll work to make it happen!

OUR NOTE  The single most common reason a grower does not switch is not price. It is that changing something that currently works, in the middle of a season, is a risk nobody gets rewarded for taking. A free sample that can be destroyed on your own dock is the only honest answer to that, and it is the question we would ask first.

THE BOX IN THE COOLER

How does it hold up in a wet cooler?

It does not soften, sag or delaminate. Water does not go into the material, so there is nothing to absorb and nothing to break down. You keep your stack height for the entire time the product sits.

The contrast is worth stating plainly. A wax carton is stiff at the moment you pack it, and that is the only moment anyone inspects it. Two to three days into a cooler it begins to break down. Once it sags you cannot stack as high and you cannot double stack, so you are paying for cooler space you can no longer use.

What happens if product sits and then sells?

In wax you are repacking twice over. Once because the box has come apart and cannot ship. And again to pull out units that have spotted or discolored so only good product leaves. That is labor nobody budgeted for and nobody invoiced anyone for.

Can I re ice product without repacking it?

Yes. Open it, re ice it in place, close it. A wax box that has sat in a cooler for five days will not survive a second pass through the icing machine, so it becomes a new box and another run.

Will my product last longer?

We will not claim extended shelf life and nobody should trust a packaging company that does. What we will claim is extended healthy shelf life. In wax, at day three to five, product reads as a week old. In ours, at day five, it still reads like day one. By day eight or nine the difference narrows. It varies by commodity, by ventilation and hole pattern, and by how wet the product went in.

It is a look test, not a laboratory test. But the look is what your buyer is grading.

Can it go through hydro cooling?

Yes. Near freezing water pouring over product for an hour is the exact condition that destroys a wax carton and does nothing to ours.

How much weight will it hold, and how high can I stack it?

PLASTPAC: we need real numbers by box format. This is the first question a plant manager asks and we cannot answer it.

Are the boxes reusable?

No, and we do not permit it. They are single use, then recovered and recycled into new boxes. A box that has been through a produce supply chain once should not go back into it.

OUR NOTE, ON THE CORN LINE  The produce industry already conceded that wax fails under water. It made that decision on sweet corn decades ago, which is why corn runs in wood, in reusable crates, or in plastic, and effectively never in wax. Hydro cooling settled the argument. The question nobody has asked out loud is why that logic stops at the corn line, when the same chilled water is running over the greens in the next room.

ORDERING, PRINTING AND TOOLING

Where are the boxes actually made?

Kenilworth, New Jersey. Resin through sheet through finished box, all in house. Nothing imported, nothing converted from somebody else's sheet.

Do you already have a box in my size?

Probably. We keep a standing die library covering the common greens, corn and broccoli formats, including the 1.35 bushel greens box. Tell us the dimensions you run and we will tell you straight whether we have it.

What if my region packs a format you do not run?

We can cut new tooling. The cost is normally forwarded to the customer. Formats vary a fair amount by growing region, so this comes up more than you would expect.

Can you print our brand on the box?

Up to four colors, though three or fewer usually looks better and prices better. Printing is applied flat, so it is effectively a single side print.

What does a print plate cost?

Roughly fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars depending on complexity, and normally the customer covers it. On real volume that is not a meaningful number. On a single load it is. If you are committing to volume we can look at absorbing it into the pricing instead. We have done that against a two year commitment before.

What colors do the boxes come in?

Mostly white. Other colors are possible.

Where do you ship?

Anywhere in the country. We have no territorial agreement restricting where we sell, and we deliver to Texas regularly.

RECYCLING AND TAKE BACK

What happens to the box when it is empty?

It comes back to us. The boxes travel with your product to the retailer, the retailer separates them out of the waste stream, we pick them up, process them, and the material goes back into new boxes. We run that loop ourselves rather than handing the material to an outside recycling company.

How does that compare to a reusable crate program on the return leg?

Because our boxes come back flat, a returning truck carries roughly thirty to thirty five thousand cartons. A reusable crate load is closer to six thousand pieces.

What happens to a wax box?

Landfill, in almost every case. The wax coating contaminates the fiber recycling stream, so mills will not take it.

Do I have to participate in the recycling program to buy boxes?

PLASTPAC: yes or no. And is the retailer pickup running today, with which retailers, and in what part of the country? This does not go on a public page until we can answer it honestly.

Plastic packaging is under pressure. Why is this different?

The material is recycled, and we take it back. It is also not a consumer item and it never reaches a consumer's hands. Every plastic contamination problem in the public conversation starts at the point where packaging reaches the public. This box does not go there. What regulators decide next is not something we can predict, and we will not pretend otherwise.

OUR NOTE, ON EXTENDED PRODUCER RESPONSIBILITY  Nobody has clear answers yet on what EPR rules apply, when, and in which states. Growers and retailers are being exposed to a rule set nobody has explained to them, and packaging suppliers have mostly stayed quiet because clarity does not help them sell. What can be said without overstating it: a mono material box with a documented take back program is a better place to be standing when those rules land than a coated composite that no mill will accept. We will keep publishing on this as it develops.

PRICE, IMPORTS AND THE ALTERNATIVES

How does this compare on price to wax?

Close. Depending on your region and your box format it can go a couple of cents either way. Wax has been rising, and in some regions and some formats wax is already the more expensive box. We are not going to tell you we are always cheaper, because that is not true and you would find out.

PLASTPAC: www.plastpac.com currently says plastic is the "Cheaper Option" and wax is "Very Costly." That is a stronger claim than what we were told. Your call on which version stands, but the two cannot both be published.

What about imported plastic corrugated from overseas?

The gap has largely closed. It used to be around forty cents a box. With tariffs and price increases it is now a couple of cents, if any. The rule of thumb on importing anything is that you do not do it unless you are saving twenty five percent or better, because under that the freight risk, the lead time and a quality problem you find mid season eat the savings.

We already use reusable plastic crates. Why would we talk to you?

We are not trying to be your first call. We are trying to be your second one. Crate pools run short, and they run short at exactly the moment you cannot afford it. Some of our customers keep a portion of their volume in our boxes for that reason, and to control which product goes into the cooler and sits.

OUR NOTE, ON THE FOUR CENT MATH  A four or five cent saving on a two dollar box, multiplied across five hundred thousand boxes, looks like a very large number on a spreadsheet. It is the number that sells imports. What the spreadsheet does not carry is the lead time you cannot compress, the freight you cannot expedite, the customs exposure, and the quality variance you discover on the packing line in the middle of your season. Growers who have been burned once do not repeat it. New growers walk into the same loop every year, because nobody writes the math down.

WHERE THIS LEAVES YOU

Most of the questions above have never been answered in one place, by anyone, in the forty odd years wax has been the default. That is not an accident. There is no upside for a wax supplier in explaining wax, and there is no credibility in a plastic supplier doing it either.

So take the part that costs you nothing. If your product ships wet, iced or hydro cooled, ask for samples. Build a pallet, load it, put it in your own cooler for a week, and look at it on day five. Nobody switches a packaging line on a promise, and nobody should.

Want samples, or a straight answer on your own box format? Tell us what you pack and we will put you in front of the manufacturer directly.

Ready to Learn More, Request Samples, or Talk to Our Team? CLICK HERE