Copacking services for online stores, retail chains, and companies

No. Conventional packaging (konfekcjonowanie) deals with individual units of goods (or bulk packs of a single product), while co-packing focuses on sets made up of several different products. This isn’t just a semantic difference — it translates into completely different requirements for the logistics operator handling the work.

Preparing warehouse space for a co-packing operation is a different process entirely, and so is training, supervising, and paying staff for it. Shipping preparation differs too. Different infrastructure is needed — for instance, it’s hard to find an IT system that can properly account for co-packing work. What’s really needed here is experience, since the process is broken down into stages with varying levels of difficulty and labor intensity, making them hard to bill or track the same way.

Co-packing:

1. Repackaging goods from bulk packaging into unit packaging
2. Assembling promotional sets
3. Combining individual products into bulk packaging
4. Adding samples of other products

Conventional packaging (Konfekcjonowanie):

1. Labeling
2. Shrink-wrapping
3. Marking products

If a company doesn’t handle co-packing in-house (and few have the space, equipment, and trained staff to do so) and is looking for a 3PL partner instead, this is something to factor in. Before signing a contract, it’s worth checking the partner’s readiness. Partners often don’t fully realize what they’re taking on when they sign — usually the result of having experience with conventional packaging but not with co-packing. This can lead to missed deadlines, packing errors, or significant budget overruns.

Generally speaking, co-packing places far greater demands on a warehouse than conventional packaging does. It’s easier to make mistakes in co-packing (since many different components are involved), and it’s harder to maintain quality control. It’s also harder to evaluate staff performance and productivity, because the co-packing process is often split into multiple stages carried out by different teams. There’s a domino effect at play — one team’s work depends on the previous team’s output, so it’s difficult to blame a team for lower productivity when they’re stuck waiting. The piece-rate pay model typically used in conventional packaging doesn’t necessarily work well here.

This way of organizing work demands much more from supervising team leaders and requires careful planning of the entire process — planning in space (how the work will flow across the warehouse floor), in time (which task follows which), and in assigning the right staffing levels. Experience is invaluable for identifying bottlenecks and allocating the right number of workers to each task individually. Co-packing sets quality and efficiency standards for the finished set, not for a single product — which is considerably harder to plan for.

It also requires more space, often including tall pallet racking. Since many different types of goods are involved, everything needs to be gathered before work begins. Items also need to be positioned so they’re easy to identify, locate, retrieve, and deliver to where the co-packing takes place.

Storage space for finished sets is often the biggest — and most frequently overlooked — challenge. Typical warehouses are filled with racking, and any free space tends to get used as a staging area for receiving and shipping goods.

Shipping finished sets is another challenge. Unlike conventional packaging, co-packing produces irregularly shaped sets, often in fragile display stands, which can easily be damaged during loading and especially during transport. If a company lacks experience preparing sets for transport — and above all, loading a truck properly — damage is likely to occur.

It’s also worth checking whether a potential partner has experience with co-packing. Without it, deadlines will slip (often triggering penalties), unit-count discrepancies will arise that are costly to correct, and damage will be common. Most importantly, the real costs only become clear at the end, once the partner tallies up what the job actually cost them — and that can be a very unpleasant surprise.