The exasperation in Lindsay Frucci’s voice is palpable as she describes the hurdles her company, No Pudge! Foods, overcame in sourcing packaging materials for its natural, fat-free brownie mixes. Frucci, the company’s founder and president, relates that most of the problems had to do with leakage attributable to the paper/plastic bags the company used previously and the long lead times to receive shipments of those bags. In April, the two-person Hopkinton, NH-based company eliminated those problems by switching to a folding carton with an inner bag.
The inner bag, a 2-mil lamination of polyester and linear low-density polyethylene, is from Union Industries (Providence, RI). The bag is packed into an outer paperboard folding carton whose unusual size and graphics provide differentiation from typical brownie mix boxes. The 18-pt clay-coated newsback folding carton, from Keystone Paper & Box (East Windsor, CT), is printed offset in five colors, plus an aqueous coating.
