Food bank thinks outside the box to save money as cost of cardboard soars

Dozens of volunteers delivered more than 500 bright red beer boxes all over Metro Toronto on Saturday, but don't judge a box by its cover.

About $25 worth of food was tucked into each red Budweiser box, loaded with lentils and pasta instead of brew.

Using these donated boxes enabled Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank to erase the cost of cardboard boxes, driven up recently by everything from the U.S. dollar to the price of wood pulp. 

With more than 500 holiday hampers to deliver this past weekend in Toronto, the boxes they were packaged in were important, said the president of the Rotary Club of Toronto, whose members were volunteering to help with deliveries.

"The price of cardboard has tripled this year, so the Daily Bread Food Bank is relying on donated boxes to keep the cost down," Jayson Phelps told CBC News on Monday.

It's not the first time the food bank has used beer boxes, but Daily Bread CEO Neil Hetherington says they moved away from the practice in the '90s, due to the stigma many clients faced because it appeared they were buying beer when in fact they were bringing home food hampers.

But sky-high prices for cardboard this year meant he was grateful when Budweiser offered up a few free skids of boxes with outdated promotional marketing.

The donated boxes saved a dollar on the cost of each hamper and that money was used to buy food instead — something sorely needed as Hetherington says the number of food bank clients has ballooned from 60,000 per month a few years ago to 200,000 per month during the pandemic.

Hetherington says the food bank was being charged $1.54 for each plain cardboard box — more than triple what they paid before the pandemic.

"We're hit on both fronts. The cost to serve our clients has gone up dramatically, and the number of clients that we have has increased," he said. "All of the cardboard that we are going through is pretty significant."

Packaging demand

And it's not just food banks that use a lot of boxes. 

In 2021, Amazon shipped an an estimated 7.7 billion packages globally, with millions of those boxes destined for Canadian doorsteps.

Corrugated cardboard boxes are already a hot commodity this time of year with the rush of holiday packages — and demand for packing boxes hit "beyond belief" record highs during the pandemic, according to Allen Kirkpatrick, executive director of the Canadian Corrugated and Containerboard Association (CCCA).

Kirkpatrick says the multi-billion-dollar industry churns out about 20 million boxes a day in Canada, but even that wasn't enough to keep up.

"Demand skyrocketed in ways that we had never seen before," he said. "As an industry, we were defined as essential, but we had no idea absolutely how essential that was going to become."

Demand may have peaked

According to a July report by economic analyst Shawn McGrath of IBISWorld Inc. in New York, the Canadian cardboard container industry was expected to hit an unprecedented worth of $7.7 billion by the end of the year.

But Kirkpatrick says that estimate includes solid fibre and folding paperboard, so the worth of the corrugated cardboard box industry is closer to $4 billion a year.

Kirkpatrick says much of the pandemic demand was driven by panic buying. That, coupled with the rising cost and lack of raw materials like wood pulp, overwhelmed the supply chain several times.

During the pandemic Kirkpatrick says box prices were 10 to 13 per cent higher than normal and orders were backed up more than six weeks in some cases.

Canadian production relies on U.S. materials and mills, according to Kirkpatrick, who noted that of the 50 production plants nation-wide, only five are mills that produce the cardboard. Western Canada has no mills and relies on one in Portland, Ore.

Food and beverage suppliers are the industry's biggest clients, and though prices are still higher than historic levels, driven in part by the current value of the U.S. dollar, Kirkpatrick believes the panic for boxes has peaked.

A new paper plant in Scarborough, Ont., is helping to ease demand, he says, and the economy is also slowing.

"We are kind of the harbinger of that 'R' word — that recession word," he said. "There is an absolute softening of all things across the economy that relate to us." 

Recycling at heart of cardboard industry

Kirkpatrick says the bigger mills continue to ship about one million boxes a day using highly efficient German and Japanese-made machines to make the cardboard. 

Each corrugated board is strengthened by sandwiching a flute — a rippled paper fibre structure that resembles a classic Roman arch — between two flat pieces of cardboard or liner.

Some machines are able to produce up to 250 metres of corrugated material per minute, so it would take about two minutes and 13 seconds to make a length the height of the CN Tower, according to the CCCA website.

Kirkpatrick says the silver lining to the high demand for the lowly cardboard box is that the industry buys back used boxes from big chains to recycle. 

"Our mills are all basically using all recycled material in Canada," he said.

Old boxes are recycled in a process called pulping, where the material is soaked in water and chemicals.

Some fresh fibre may be added to increase strength and quality, but for the most part, cardboard boxes, which are often made of pine from the southern U.S., are remade over and over again according to Kirkpatrick — "Just add water and stir."

Back at the food bank, organizers have found a new option in box suppliers called Rebox Corp., which reuses old boxes to keep costs low.

Hetherington says the food bank goes through 1,500 boxes a day to ship $18 million worth of food from their warehouse to locations across Toronto each year, so every cheap or free box helps.

"We are in this absolute crisis right now," he said, referring to high food bank usage, noting that he's connecting with box makers to try to come up with other potential solutions for cheaper packaging needs.