Did you get insurance or a warranty for any of your Christmas gifts this year? When you received your package, was it damaged, or worse, never made it to your house? Many people know that feeling of the awful realization your expensive Christmas gift for your grandmother arrived broken when it should have been handled with care.

Thinking past Christmas gifts, imagine what an even greater problem it is when your livelihood (as well as your employee’s) is at risk for similar destruction.

What if all it took was a little more attention to detail and a few less crossed fingers?

Think of your favorite pasta sauce. After it gets made and put into individual jars, those bottles get packaged and put on a pallet. There’s probably some stretch wrap involved, maybe even some corrugate. They pack up a truck headed to your grocery store so you can enjoy your delicious treat.

But wait! The truck hits a pothole on the way to the store and shows up with a truck full of spilled sauce and broken glass. The manufacturer loses money on that damaged product; the grocery store is angry it can’t sell you your sauce, and you have to go home and eat plain spaghetti noodles.

One wrong bump in the road can cause a lot of trouble. Fortunately, it may have a fairly simple solution.

There are three important components to creating a safe ride for products. If you get all three of them right, you can skip the insurance paper work, uncross your fingers and still rest easy.

• Component #1: The Pallet – Every house needs a sturdy foundation; the same is true for a unit load. Using the correct design and materials can be the difference between your product making it to its destination or falling apart en route.
• Component #2: The Consumables– Without the proper stretch film, air bags or strapping, your product can slide right off that sturdy foundation you built for it. If there’s any chance your unit load will be jostled around while traveling, it’s always a safe bet to apply the correct consumable product.
• Component #3: The Technique – If consumables aren’t applied correctly, they may as well not be applied at all. Stretch film must be wrapped with the correct amount of tension to provide support or else you may as well have used wrapping paper to secure your load. Stretch wrappers, shrink wrappers and other packaging machinery is often essential to the safety of your product.

So next time you enjoy a spaghetti dinner, think of the risk that jar took to get to you. Think of the grocery store who was pleased to see everything in their inventory survived the trip. Finally, think of the manufacturer, who mastered not only the recipe for the perfect sauce, but the recipe for a perfect unit load.