Holidaypac · Brand-Value Food Packaging Factory
Custom Food Boxes Built by a Factory That Actually Eats Its Own Cooking
From a midnight pizza order to a Michelin chef's plated dessert tasting menu—food packaging is the first thing your customer touches and the last thing they remember. For 18 years Holidaypac has been printing, die-cutting, gluing and shipping food boxes for restaurants, bakeries, meal-kit start-ups and Fortune-500 retailers across 60+ countries. We are not a trading company. We are the workshop where ink hits paper at 6 a.m. and the last carton leaves the dock at midnight.
Food-Grade MaterialsFDA / LFGB / EU 1935-2004BRCGS CertifiedSGS AuditedFSC PaperWorldwide Shipping
The Full Food Boxes Range
Fourteen production lines under one roof in Shenzhen. Click any category to see real samples, MOQ and lead times. Every image below is a job we have actually shipped—not a stock photo.
Why Brands Choose Holidaypac for Food Packaging
A factory—not a middleman. Our 18,000 m² Shenzhen plant and our second site in Cambodia let us serve clients in the US, EU, AU and the Middle East with both speed and tariff-friendly logistics.
100%
Food-Grade Inks & Paper
Soy-based and water-based inks. FSC virgin or recycled fibres. Aqueous coatings instead of PE film—safer for food, kinder to the planet.
2
Country Manufacturing
Shenzhen for design speed and tooling depth, Cambodia for tariff-friendly export. Same QC team. Same standard.
24h
Free Custom Design
Send us a brief, a sketch, even a napkin photo. Our in-house structural designers turn it into a die-line and 3D mock-up within one working day.
60+
Countries Shipped
Sea, air, rail and door-to-door. We handle the customs paperwork, you receive a pallet ready to sell.
Frequently Asked Questions
Twelve questions our buyers actually ask—answered honestly by the people who run the line, not by a chatbot.
What papers and coatings do you use for direct food contact?
For dry food (cookies, cake, chocolate, sandwiches, sushi rolls) we use FDA / LFGB-certified virgin kraft, white-clay coated or food-grade SBS board between 250–450 gsm. For oily or saucy food we add an aqueous (water-based) coating that survives 200 C in a microwave or oven. We deliberately avoid PE film lamination because it complicates recycling. If your market needs PFAS-free, we will sign that statement on the PI.
What is the minimum order quantity (MOQ)?
For stock structures (pizza, kraft fast-food, sushi, salad) the MOQ starts at 500 pieces with full-colour print. For bespoke shapes that need a new die-cutter we usually start at 1,000–2,000 pieces so the tooling cost makes sense for you. We are open to lower MOQs for sample runs—ask us, we have helped a lot of small bakeries launch with 300 units.
How long is the lead time?
Pre-production sample: 5–7 working days including the 3D rendering, cutting die and a printed dummy. Bulk production: 12–18 working days for typical jobs, 20–25 days for rigid magnetic boxes or anything with hot foil and embossing. We give you a real Gantt chart, not a one-line ETA.
Can you handle leak-proof or grease-proof requirements?
Yes. We run three different barrier solutions in-house: water-based aqueous coating (most popular, recyclable), PLA inner film (compostable) and traditional PE lamination (lowest cost). For burger and fries boxes we run a special grease-resistant kraft that has been tested for 60 minutes of contact at 70 C without bleed-through.
Do you provide free design and die-line?
Free. If you have an idea sketched on a napkin, that is enough to start. Our structural team builds the die-line, our graphic team mocks up the print, and we send you a 3D rendering plus a flat artwork file before any tooling is cut. There is no design charge, no minimum project value, no surprise fees.
Are your boxes microwave and freezer safe?
Most of our food boxes are. Aqueous-coated kraft and SBS go from -18 C freezer to 200 C microwave without delaminating. We label every spec sheet with the exact temperature window—ask for the technical data sheet and we will send you the lab report.
How do you protect my brand and artwork?
Every NDA is signed before the first file is exchanged. Production files are stored on an internal server, plate films are destroyed after the job, and we never use your photographs in our public catalogue without written permission. Our biggest US clients are household names you would recognize—and you have never seen their packaging on our site. That is the point.
What certifications do you carry?
BRCGS Packaging (food contact), ISO 9001 quality, ISO 14001 environment, FSC chain-of-custody, FDA, LFGB, EU 1935/2004, SEDEX SMETA 4-pillar audit, BSCI. The certificates live on a Dropbox link we send during quoting—no need to ask three times.
Can I order from outside China? How does shipping work?
About 78% of our food-box clients are outside China—US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Australia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Korea. We quote EXW, FOB, CIF and DDP. For the US and EU we have established freight partners with weekly LCL consolidations, so a 500-piece pilot run can land at your warehouse for a few hundred dollars in freight.
Are your materials really recyclable or compostable?
Plain kraft and clay-coated paper are widely recyclable in curbside streams. Our PLA-lined boxes are industrially compostable (BPI / TUV OK Compost certified on request). The honest part: aqueous coatings are recyclable in most municipal mills but not always; we will tell you exactly which spec lands you which logo, instead of slapping "eco-friendly" on everything.
How is pricing structured?
Three buckets: paper & printing, tooling (cutting die + plates), and finishing (gluing, foil, lamination, inserts). On a 5,000-pcs order tooling becomes a small share of unit cost. We never hide tooling in the unit price—you see it as a one-time line on the PI, and you keep the cutting die for future reorders.
What makes Holidaypac different from a trading company?
You are talking to the people who own the printing press. When you ask for a tighter Pantone match, the answer comes back in 20 minutes from the press operator—not three days from a translator forwarding emails. We invite every serious client to a video walk-through of the floor; you will see the exact press, the exact die-cutter and the exact gluer that will run your job.
About Holidaypac — A Brand-Value Food Packaging Factory
The story behind the boxes
Holidaypac was started in 2007 inside a small rented workshop on the outskirts of Shenzhen, China. The first machine on our floor was a second-hand four-colour offset press that we paid off over thirty months. The first food client was a Hong Kong bakery that wanted 2,000 cake boxes for a Mid-Autumn Festival promotion. We delivered them three days early, by van, on a Sunday. That bakery is still our customer eighteen years later. Roughly a third of our top-fifty buyers have been with us for more than a decade, which is unusual in this industry and which we take quietly seriously.
Today the same family-run business operates an 18,000-square-metre printing and converting plant in Shenzhen plus a sister facility in Cambodia for tariff-friendly export to North America. We employ around 320 people. The original founder still walks the floor every morning before the first shift starts, asking the press operators what is broken, what is slow, what is wasting paper. That habit is the reason our scrap rate sits at 1.8% when the industry average hovers around 5%.
What "brand-value factory" means in practice
The phrase gets thrown around. We use it to describe a specific way of working. Most Chinese converters will quote you a price, take a deposit, run the job, and wait for the next purchase order. We try to do something different. Before we quote we ask the buyer what their brand promise sounds like in one sentence. We ask who their customer is, what shelf or food court the box will land on, what the unboxing video should feel like. Then we suggest a structure, a paper, a coating and a finish that supports that promise—sometimes pushing back on the original brief when we think the buyer is over-spending or under-spending. Several of our long-term clients have told us they keep coming back precisely because we argue with them. We think that is a reasonable definition of partnership.
It also means we treat your packaging as something that lives on a shelf with a logo, not as a commodity sold by the kilo. Our designers have shipped award-winning structural work for chocolate brands, sushi chains, baby-food labels and meal-kit start-ups. We have copies of those awards in a glass cabinet by the reception, but we will not show you the artwork unless the client has given written permission. Confidentiality is part of brand value.
The Common Topics Every Food Packaging Buyer Asks About
1. Food safety and the paperwork that proves it
Whether you sell sushi in Tokyo, sandwiches in London or bakery boxes in Houston, the customs officer wants the same thing: documentary evidence that the packaging is safe for direct food contact. We build a compliance pack with every single bulk shipment—FDA declaration, LFGB lab report, EU 1935/2004 conformity statement, BPA-free statement, heavy-metal migration test, plus the specific test you might need for niche markets like Japan's Food Sanitation Act or Korea's MFDS. The pack is digital, dated, signed by our QA manager and traceable to the exact production batch. If you ever get a customs hold, the document arrives on your phone within thirty minutes.
2. Materials — what each food category really needs
Pizza is hot, oily and dropped into a bag for delivery. The right paper is E-flute corrugated kraft (140–160 gsm liner) with a built-in steam-vent pattern so the crust does not go soft. Sushi sits at room temperature for ninety minutes max, but the soy sauce will leak; we use food-grade rigid SBS with a black or pastel inside, optional sauce-cup wells and a magnetic snap so the lid stays shut in a delivery bag. Cakes need rigidity and a tall window, which is why we run a 350 gsm clay-coated board with a PET window film. Bakery treats are dry but oily; aqueous-coated white kraft is the sweet spot. Air-fryer liners need to survive 220 C, so we switch to a special baking-grade greaseproof paper imported from a Finnish mill.
3. Structural design — why the right die-line saves money
Buyers often focus on the print and overlook the structure. A bad die-line wastes ten percent of every paper sheet, slows the gluer down by half, and produces boxes that do not lock cleanly on a busy Friday night. We have a four-person structural team whose only job is to maximise pieces per sheet, minimise glue points and design for a packing speed that matches the buyer's reality. For one US sushi chain we redesigned the original three-piece box into a single die-cut tray with a built-in lid. The new structure costs the same to print but assembles in eight seconds instead of twenty-three. The chain saved roughly 90,000 USD a year in labour. We did not raise the unit price.
4. Print quality and colour matching
Food brands live and die by colour consistency. A pink that drifts orange between batches turns a premium bakery box into a discount-store reject. We run colour with a calibrated spectrophotometer, target Delta-E below 2 for any Pantone match, and archive every approved swatch on the production order. Our offset presses are Heidelberg CD 102 and CX 102, our flexo lines are Mark Andy and Bobst. For high-end gift boxes we add hot foil, embossing, soft-touch lamination and spot UV. For everyday take-out we keep it economical—four-colour process with one Pantone, on a fast eight-up sheet.
5. Sustainability without the green-washing
The food packaging industry has a complicated relationship with the word "eco". We have heard buyers ask for biodegradable boxes that are still wrapped in plastic, and brands that demand the FSC logo without buying FSC-certified paper. We have decided not to play that game. When you ask us for a sustainability claim, we will tell you exactly what is true and what is not. Aqueous-coated kraft is recyclable in most municipal mills but not all. PLA-lined boxes are industrially compostable but not home-compostable. PE-laminated cartons feel premium but rarely make it back into the paper stream. We give you the trade-offs in plain language, and we put the right logo on the box only when the certificate is real.
Our current waste-stream numbers: 92% of our paper trim is sold to a Guangdong recycling mill that turns it into low-grade liner. 100% of our offset solvents are captured by a closed-loop recovery system. Solar panels on the Shenzhen roof cover roughly 38% of daytime electricity. We are not perfect—the printing industry is energy-hungry by nature—but we are honest about what we are doing.
6. Logistics, tariffs and what landed cost really looks like
If you sell in the United States, the recent tariff changes have made "Made in China" food packaging more expensive overnight. Our Cambodia plant exists for that reason. The tooling and the artwork files travel between the two sites instantly; the paper specs, the printing standard and the QC team are identical. For US buyers we typically split the order: pilot run in Shenzhen for design speed, repeat orders in Cambodia for tariff savings. For EU buyers we keep production in Shenzhen because the tariff difference is modest and the lead time is two days shorter.
We quote on EXW, FOB, CIF and DDP basis, and we have a forwarding partner in Yantian and Sihanoukville with weekly LCL containers to LA, NY, Felixstowe, Hamburg, Sydney, Dubai and Tokyo. A typical 1,000-piece pizza-box order lands at a US warehouse in 35–42 days door-to-door including production. Express air freight cuts that to 12–15 days for urgent launches.
7. Industries we serve every day
Restaurants and quick-service chains: Japanese sushi bars, pizzerias, burger franchises, coffee shops, bakeries, ice-cream parlours, grilled-meat franchises. Retail and grocery: cake aisle, bakery counter, deli, frozen aisle, ready-meal section. E-commerce: meal-kit subscription services, frozen seafood importers, premium chocolate gifting, dessert delivery brands, charcuterie box subscriptions. Hospitality and events: hotel breakfast take-away, in-flight catering, wedding favours, conference grazing platters. Each segment has its own structural and material logic, and we have run jobs in every one of them.
8. The unboxing experience and why it sells the next box
One of our best-selling sushi customers grew from 12 shops to 78 shops in four years partly because their delivery boxes started showing up on TikTok. The buyer worked with our structural team to add a tear-strip on the side, a hidden printed message inside the lid, and a magnetic flap that snapped shut with a satisfying click. None of those features cost more than 0.03 USD per piece. Together they turned the packaging into a piece of free marketing. When food packaging is treated as part of the brand experience instead of a cost line, the maths shifts. We have seen the same pattern with bakery brands, chocolate gifting brands and meal-kit services. The box does the selling after the food is eaten.
9. Quality control — what we actually check
Three inspections, every order, no exceptions. Pre-production: paper GSM, coating weight, moisture content, colour drawdown approved against the master swatch. In-line: every 500 sheets the press operator pulls a sample, checks register, density and Delta-E, signs the time-stamped log. Pre-shipment: a third-party-style AQL 2.5 inspection on the finished pallets, with a 30-page photo report sent to your inbox before the container is sealed. If anything fails, we re-run on our cost. We have re-run roughly 1.4% of all jobs in the last three years; the industry average for re-run rate is closer to 4%.
10. What the future of food packaging looks like
Three trends we are betting on. First, mono-material recyclability—buyers will pay a small premium for a box that is 100% paper, no plastic film, certified curbside-recyclable. Second, smart packaging—QR codes that tell the diner where the salmon was caught, when the dough was kneaded, how many calories are inside. Third, micro-batch personalisation—digital presses that let a 500-piece run carry 500 different names without slowing down. We have invested in HP Indigo digital, in PFAS-free coatings, in QR-code variable data printing. We do not always know what the next big thing is, but we want to be ready when our customers ask for it.
11. The Holidaypac promise, in three sentences
We will tell you the truth about what your packaging can and cannot do, even when the truth costs us a sale. We will run the job on machines we own, supervised by people we have trained, in a building we have walked through that morning. And we will be here next year, and the year after, picking up the phone when you call.
Ready to talk about your food packaging?
Tell us what you sell, where you sell it and how soon you need samples. We will come back the same day with a structural recommendation, a price band, a lead time and an honest opinion. No sales scripts, no pressure—just the workshop owner's direct answer.
Get a Free Quote & Sample
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