How to Unfreeze Failure: Lifting The Lid on Your Ice Cream Packaging

In our previous blog post, we talked about the importance of recyclable ice cream tub packaging in general, but this time we’re taking it from the top, literally. Now we’ll be focusing on the question of whether your packaging needs a lid of the same kind.

Having a grasp on this seemingly small question is, in reality, a significant way of cutting costs. Just think of how many times you would need to purchase an extra lid compared to avoiding it.

Picture it this way: if your consumer is going to find the extra purchase irritating, then multiply the intensity of that emotion by the number of ice creams you sell that day. Save yourself the struggle and read on to be informed before you make another regretful purchase.

Impulse Purchases

The first way to know if you should consider purchasing recyclable lids for your business will be based on its nature. A simple way of picturing this is asking either yourself, or better yet your customers, whether they would have time to enjoy the ice cream before it melts. If the answer is yes, then you shouldn’t need a lid.

If you’re serving ice cream out of a van alongside choices like a wafer cone, it tends to be even less worth adding lids to stocklists too. People tend to buy these products impulsively on a short term basis, so they’ll eat them without taking them home. 

Retail Setting

When you’re taking the ice cream tub from a freezer to the customer’s hands, it will almost always be considered a retail setting. This is a point of purchase where a consumer is less likely to make sudden or impulse purchases.

Though most tend to enjoy ice cream from a tub in one go, when the product is bought and sold in this environment, a lid makes it more functional because it can be brought home rather than enjoyed on the spot.

Premium or Single-Serve Product

On a basic functional level, the stackability of the product is most obviously changed if it has a lid or not. In addition to this though, its brand positioning will change if it does or doesn’t have a lid. It sounds absurd, but consumers consider a product more premium, and thus more deserving of a higher price point, if it has more packaging. 

The chosen difference between your ice cream brand being marketed as premium or single-serve and more commonly available in an impulsive purchase setting will be what really sets it apart here. Just make sure you’re not buying a lid for the sake of it: see if this is a decision that will really contribute to the overall premium quality of the product or not first.

The Perfect Fit

You probably think your business is unique, and Marshall Wilson agrees with you. That’s why the best way we will be able to advise you on whether or not your recyclable ice cream tubs would benefit from the inclusion of a lid is by asking a member of our team who can respond directly. 

Contact us today to learn how we can help.