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Budelpack Develops Custom ‘Co-Packing On-Demand’ Line for Meal-Kit Company

Netherlands food co-packer Budelpack engineers a new packaging line driven by a custom software system that delivers pouched meal-kit ingredients on-demand, with no pause in production.

Peter Nieuwkerk, Managing Director, Budelpack
Peter Nieuwkerk, Managing Director, Budelpack

Driven by consumers’ desire for fresh, convenient meal options and accelerated by the home-cooking trend sparked by the pandemic, the meal-kit market in the U.S. shows a healthy CAGR of 11.25% through 2025. That’s according to TechNavio, which adds that the greatest growth in the meal-kit market will come from the U.S., at 54%. However, meal kits are not just a U.S. phenomenon. According to ReportLinker, the global meal-kit services market is forecast to reach $17.8 billion by 2027.

Meal kits, in a nutshell, comprise a kit of pre-measured food ingredients—usually a mix of shelf-stable and fresh, depending on the meal—and an easy-to follow recipe that allows the consumer to prepare the meal at home. They typically operate on a direct-to-consumer subscription basis. For a large meal-kit provider, such as HelloFresh, one of the world’s leading meal-kit companies, the number of recipe options it offers its subscribers each week can total more than 50. For these companies, stocking a large range of shelf-stable items packaged in different portion sizes is viable.


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But what about a smaller, perhaps more specialized meal-kit company offering a limited number of meal options each week? In their case, unpredictability in terms of which ingredients may be needed week to week is a constant. By ordering large quantities of pre-packaged dry product, these companies run the risk of having lower working capital on-hand and obsolete products.

In the Netherlands, co-packer Budelpack has devised a unique solution made up of custom software and a highly flexible packaging line developed specifically to address this unpredictability. The name given this service is Co-Packing On-Demand.

Unpredictability leads to new technology

Budelpack is a family-owned company named after a town in the province of Brabant called Budel, which is where the company started in 1971. It was that year that André Nieuwkerk launched the Netherlands’ first co-packing operation at his confectionary as a service for Mars. Since then, Budelpack has become one of Europe’s leading co-packers.

Each year, Budelpack co-packs more than 360 million solid, liquid, powdered, and granulated food and pet food products in primary packaging. The company operates a multi-client plant in Poortvliet in the southwest of the Netherlands, and through its partnership with a well-established logistics provider, it can pack products anywhere in Europe and the U.K.

Up until 2020, when its Co-Packing On-Demand line became operational, Budelpack’s meal-kit clients comprised larger companies only, with the total number of SKUs handled by the co-packer numbering 300. For these larger brands, the co-packer produces batches from 10,000 to 100,000 at a time.

Budelpack fills a range of rice and grain products in different weights and sizes on its Co-Packing On-Demand line.Budelpack fills a range of rice and grain products in different weights and sizes on its Co-Packing On-Demand line.In 2018, a meal kit company approached Budelpack looking for small, changeable orders of 200 to 1,000 bags per run. The unpredictability faced by the meal-kit concern is one Peter Nieuwkerk, Budelpack Managing Director and son of company founder, André Nieuwkerk, is very familiar with.

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