The Cardboard Boxpocalypse and the State of the US Economy

Almost everything we buy nowadays has been in a box at some point. Goods are shipped in boxes. Products ordered online arrive at our doorstep in boxes. Boxes are so ubiquitous that some strategists use them as an unconventional macroeconomic indicator to gauge retail spending. Now, shipments of boxes are falling dramatically. At the same time, prices for boxes have actually been going up. So, what's going on? And what does it suggest about the health of the US consumer and the broader economy? In this episode, we speak with Ryan Fox, containers and packaging analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. We talk about the box industry overall, how companies choose their packaging, and what makes the perfect box. Read more:Lula, Xi Decry Tariffs and Urge BRICS Unity Amid Trump ThreatsWhat Declining Cardboard Box Sales Tell Us About the US Economy Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

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  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

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• 2:49Speaker 04

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• 3:05Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 3:09Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Wazenthal.

• 3:11Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I am going to put something on the table and you tell me what it is, okay?

• 3:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Go on.

• 3:17Tracy Alloway?

  All right, here I go.

• 3:22Joe Weisenthal?

  It is a, this is, so this is a corrugated, I believe, cardboard box and has tape that says fragile. And I would guess it's about, I don't know, I'm not good at measurements, it'd be 18 inches by 36 inches, something like that.

• 3:39Tracy Alloway?

  That is a very good physical description of a box.

• 3:43Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a cardboard box.

• 3:43Tracy Alloway?

  However, I'm going to say you're wrong. It is, in fact, a macroeconomic indicator. The other acceptable answer is it's part of the Odd Lots logo.

• 3:53Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right, that's right. It's a box and that is core to Odd Lots. But, you know, now we're going to talk about literally when you think box, you don't often first think Magic Money Box Pons. And when you think box, you often don't necessarily think of a container ship, which is often called a box, as in the book The Box. But I think when people think about a box, they think about a cardboard box, corrugated or not.

• 4:17Tracy Alloway?

  Now is a very good time to be thinking about boxes, by the way, because there's been some commentary about this, but we've basically had a sort of boxpocalypse

• 4:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Tracy Alloway?

  in the States.

• 4:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Are we still having one?

• 4:27Tracy Alloway?

  Uh, jury's kind of out and we'll get into that in the discussion, but US box shipments, so boxes of boxes, which I find funny, sort of boxception. Anyway, US box shipments have fallen to the lowest second quarter reading since 2015. That's according to the Fiber Box Association.

• 4:47Joe Weisenthal?

  So these are probably like, probably like they're like folded up.

• 4:49Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 4:50Joe Weisenthal?

  They're probably not, yeah. So you, a bunch of them, they're maybe wrapped in plastic or something like that. So shipments of those lowest since like 2015.

• 4:57Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. And I think there are some other numbers we can get into that are like the worst since the financial crisis and things like that. And obviously the concern is boxes tend to contain products that people are buying, right? So if no one's buying boxes, what does that say about retail spending, the health of the consumer and the direction of the broader economy? That's when you get into the macro indicator stuff.

• 5:20Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I love e-commerce, but I hate breaking down boxes.

• 5:24Tracy Alloway?

  I know, I know.

• 5:25Joe Weisenthal?

  I hate it so much. And then you're like, rip it up. There's no, it's never quick. I would like to see some innovation on the ease of collapsibility of purple boxes.

• 5:34Tracy Alloway?

  You know what I did? Cause I buy a lot. I trained my dog to rip apart Amazon boxes.

• 5:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 5:39Tracy Alloway?

  But then he kind of went on strike and stopped doing it.

• 5:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, that would have been cool.

• 5:42Tracy Alloway?

  Get your kids to do it.

• 5:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Tracy Alloway?

  Put them to work. Okay. Well, I am happy to say we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Ryan Fox. He is a containers and packaging analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. So Ryan, thanks so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 5:58Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me.

• 5:59Tracy Alloway?

  It's so nice to actually meet you in person because we've been I being for a while talking about boxes. I don't know how this became so interesting to me, but probably because of the decline that we've been seeing. Walk us through the numbers. Like how bad is the actual fall in boxes of boxes, shipments of boxes?

• 6:18Speaker 07

  Yes. So when we think about box shipments, they are shipped, like you said, knocked down flat or KDF for short.

• 6:24Joe Weisenthal?

  KDF stands for, oh, knocked down flat. Amazing. I already learned something.

• 6:28Speaker 07

  And so they're shipped sometimes on pallets, but they're going to, in the US, end markets like food manufacturers, beverage manufacturers, people who make industrial products.

• 6:40Speaker 07

  About 50% of the boxes that we consume in the US are gonna go through a grocery store. So that's a really good way to think about it.

• 6:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Huh.

• 6:47Speaker 07

  What we've seen, box shipments have fallen in the first half about 2.3%. And this is largely due to uncertainties that are stemming from tariffs. We saw a big ramp up during the pandemic where box shipments grew the first year of the pandemic by about 3.5%. Actually, 2.4%, then 3.5% the following year. When we think about it in concrete terms, we talk about box shipments in terms of billions of square feet. And when we talk about billions of square feet, like 400 billion square feet would wrap around the earth like 30 times or something like that. It's a very big number.

• 7:22Joe Weisenthal?

  So what exactly is being measured here?

• 7:24Speaker 07

  Right. So if you were to take this box here and we were to tear it all apart.

• 7:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, okay.

• 7:29Speaker 07

  There's a, so by the way, this is a, this is a regular slotted carton.

• 7:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 7:33Speaker 07

  This is a double wall box.

• 7:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, what is it? That means it's not corrugated?

• 7:36Speaker 07

  No, this is corrugated. So let's, let's take a little quick parenthetical thought here. So cardboard is actually not this. This is a corrugated fiberboard box for all you box nerds out there.

• 7:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 7:47Speaker 07

  This box has, this particular one is a double wall, so there's five layers. The flat sheet is called liner. The wavy part in the middle is called medium.

• 7:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Are you like in heaven right now?

• 7:54Speaker 07

  I am so much in heaven right now. You don't even know.

• 7:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right. Keep talking about it. No, you don't have to stop.

• 8:00Speaker 07

  So if we were to, if we were to unfold this thing, separate the glue seam and lay it out flat and you just do basic math. Or you take your tape measure and you go width and length. So that would measure it in terms of square footage. And this box right here, it's been cut down, so it doesn't look as big as it really is. But it's probably somewhere around 20 square feet. We could measure if we wanted to, but we won't. But if you were to do that for every single box, that's how they will measure it. What's really kind of important is these boxes are made on a variety of different machines. And one of the reasons why it's called a corrugated box is it's made on a corrugator.

• 8:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Huh.

• 8:34Speaker 07

  And that's a machine that takes different kinds of paper and it laminates together. They stick together with typically cornstarch or some other starch product. So one of the mechanisms is called a corrugator roll and it's a. It's a roll with these little wrinkles in it. They steam the paper and it forms those little arches. And that's what gives the board its strength. There are different sizes of these little things like they're then they're called flutes, but you can't play them. They don't make any music.

• 9:02Tracy Alloway?

  This is so interesting.

• 9:04Joe Weisenthal?

  It's super interesting. Let's just keep talking about this box. What is it about the corrugation process that makes it stronger?

• 9:08Speaker 07

  So from a physics standpoint, it's what gives the box its shape and substance. And there is a lot of science that goes behind this. In fact, we now have ways to predict how the box will perform in real world situations, just mathematically.

• 9:23Tracy Alloway?

  Do we do box testing where we like beat up a box?

• 9:25Speaker 07

  Absolutely. Yeah. And so for a lot of companies, they have to go through the ISTI, International Safe Transit Authority. They actually test the box to make sure it will hold up against UPS or FedEx. Or in some instances, they go so far as to make sure that no matter what happens, it's going to survive. And those tests can cost thousands of dollars. So it's a very robust process.

• 9:52Tracy Alloway?

  What's the best box? Before we go, before we go into what was happening right now.

• 9:57Speaker 07

  Everyone has their favorite box. I mean, as adults, we you've you've really gotten into adulthood. When you get that box and you're like, that's a really good box.

• 10:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Anything that's easy to collapse.

• 10:09Speaker 07

  Anything that's easy to collapse is one way.

• 10:11Tracy Alloway?

  No, anything that's easy to open. I like the zipper ones.

• 10:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, a lot of people like the zipper pulls. There are some boxes that are very elaborate and they don't require much at all to set them up. They kind of fold and lock in on themselves.

• 10:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 07

  We call those die cut boxes. They are made from a cutting die that looks like a big cookie cutter. And they will make any shape that you want to make. The most popular style is what we call a roll end box. And they can tuck on the inside, they can tuck on the outside. But this is really a nice box. It's it's a box that you might see if you were to buy something online. And they're really trying to go for that wow factor because they're going to get for that ta-da, kind of open the box and show off the product.

• 10:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's start more about this box on the table here. Like, are you learned enough in the space? You could say like, oh, I think this came from X mill or X year or like, you have any other insights to bear?

• 11:07Speaker 07

  Okay, so this box doesn't have it that I can see. But on most boxes that are made in the USA, there is a small little stamp on the bottom of the box. It's round and it's called a boxmaker's certificate.

• 11:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 11:20Speaker 07

  There are around 1,100 facilities in the US that make corrugated boxes. And that little stamp on the bottom will tell you what company made the box and where it's located. And more specifically, it will tell you what the stuff is made of. And you might go, that's kind of a stupid detail, but it goes back over 60 years. It actually goes back over 100 years to when boxes were first starting to come around. Most people don't know that corrugated boxes are only 130, 140 years old.

• 11:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Huh.

• 11:51Speaker 07

  Only implemented in the late 1890s.

• 11:53Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm trying to think of before there's someone said, Joe, what do you think the first corrugated? As if I would have even begun to have a guess. Anyway, keep going.

• 12:00Speaker 07

  So right after the turn of the century in the early 1900s, companies were looking for ways to ship their product. The only mechanism they had in that time, we didn't really have 18-wheelers. We had trains. And so the rail companies, as they were making new rails, they're cutting down forests. They had lots of wood to do something with. So what did they do? They made crates.

• 12:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Huh.

• 12:24Speaker 07

  But crates were very expensive and they were very heavy. And so people were looking for alternatives and they came up with a corrugated box. It actually goes back, funny New York story. The Dumbo area is home to the Gare building. And Gare was one of the early pioneers of paper packaging. And he kind of discovered by accident that you could score paper and create these nice little boxes.

• 12:50Tracy Alloway?

  I will never look at Dumbo the same way again. Okay, actually, that reminds me. So who are the actual big players in the paper industry? Because I don't think I could name a single one off the top of my head.

• 13:02Joe Weisenthal?

  I can.

• 13:03Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, who?

• 13:04Joe Weisenthal?

  International Paper and what used to be Smurfette Stone.

• 13:07Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah. Smurfette. Okay, that's good.

• 13:08Speaker 07

  So you're exactly right. International Paper recently got even bigger. They acquired DS Smith out of Europe.

• 13:15Joe Weisenthal?

  There was one named Crown.

• 13:17Speaker 07

  Crown was also, well, they're still around.

• 13:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Why do you know this? I, I actually, in the brief time when I was a equity analyst over about 20 years ago, I think I did a little research into this space. A box analyst, a fellow box analyst. All right. Very brief, a devil in box. Anyway, keep going.

• 13:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. So International Paper recently bought DS Smith. They got even bigger. They were keeping pace with Smurfette Kappa, based out of Dublin, Ireland, who bought WestRock, who's here in the US. They became kind of the first global, like mega company, IP followed suit. So they're the two biggest in the US and the biggest in the world. Packaging Corporation of America is number three in the US, followed by Georgia Pacific, Pratt Industries, and a variety of smaller independents.

• 14:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Now, the other thing, one of the other boxes come from trees, right? Or lumber comes from trees. You know, we've talked about lumber a lot on this show, and one of the things that we learned, you know, there's been consolidation in the lumber space, but also particularly after the great financial crisis, there was a lot of reduction in mill capacity. Now, that's related to housing specifically, which was ground zero. But what is the story of American mill capacity over the last 20 years from prior to the great financial crisis to the 2010s to now?

• 14:29Speaker 07

  We really didn't see a whole lot of new mill capacity come along like 20 years ago. There was some investment. There were, there were some new mills that would come along. I actually spent 10 years working in the corrugated packaging industry before coming to Bloomberg and worked for one of those integrated companies who has their own paper mills. The mills that I worked for were 100% recycled. And so some of their investment would have shown up in that last 20 years. They've built many of the most recent mills over the last 20 years. But we really saw an explosion of growth right around the time of the pandemic. So in 2023, two and a half million tons of new 100% recycled containerboard.

• 15:11Speaker 07

  Making capacity came online and now containerboard is a technical term. It's the big term for the paper that goes in these boxes. So containerboard means linerboard and or the medium. So it's this big term.

• 15:24Tracy Alloway?

  So everyone's shipping flour for their like sourdough or something during the pandemic or buying new ovens to remodel their houses while they can. Just going back to the idea of the box as a macroeconomic indicator. I mean, I do see people talking about like this idea of boxes as a leading indicator every once in a while. It is unconventional, but some people do it. How valuable are box shipments or tracking the box industry in terms of trying to figure out what's going on with the consumer?

• 15:55Speaker 07

  Very important for the consumer. Like I said, about 50% of box consumption is going to go through a grocery store. So when you start to see box shipments slip, we probably need to be looking at grocery stores and CPG companies to see what's going on there. And we have seen a very challenged consumer environment over the last two years. My personal opinion, I would say we're in a consumer goods recession because of what we've seen. First half of 2025, box shipments were down 12% from the height of the pandemic. That's a massive falloff. So earlier we talked about how we would measure these things in billions of square feet.

• 16:36Speaker 07

  Well, in 2021, we hit 416 billion square feet. The first half was right around half of that. So like about 208. It was really bad. Quick math was 190 billion square feet for the first half of 2025. So pretty big falloff.

• 16:54Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Rees, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 17:26Speaker 08

  We're seeing a lot of institutional players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service institutional clients.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Rees-McRae's Rippel says.

• 17:42Speaker 09

  A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 18:54Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  For big business, AI opened up a world of promise, but that world of promise turned into a world of pain. Costs spiraling, data scattered across disconnected systems, security and governance increasingly complex, AI initiatives struggling to scale, and ROI that remains frustratingly out of reach. The challenge isn't AI itself, it's having the infrastructure AI needs to succeed, which is right where Boomi says, "We got you." Tens of thousands of enterprises trust Boomi to connect data, applications, processes, and AI. With Boomi, businesses can eliminate silos, automate workflows, strengthen governance, and create the foundation AI needs to perform at scale. The result?

• 20:17Speaker 02

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• 20:33Joe Weisenthal?

  What's happening with prices? And so obviously, right? So measuring square feet is one thing. What is happening with prices?

• 20:41Speaker 07

  Well, the pricing discussion is one that is sure full of controversy. So what drives pricing? Is it truly supply and demand? Is it something that's more cost-based? For many, many years in the US, it was supply-demand based, where mill operating rates would hit 96%. Inventories would get real low and they would raise prices. Or the opposite. Mill operating rates would go below 90%. Inventories would rise and prices would fall. But for the last year and a half, we've actually seen none of those fundamentals hold up. So mill operating rates have barely been 90%. Inventories hit five weeks at the end of the first quarter, and yet prices still went up.

• 21:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Five weeks is a lot of inventory.

• 21:20Speaker 07

  Five weeks is a lot of inventory. Historical averages are around four weeks. To kind of set the floor there, three and a half weeks. Guess a little dangerous when it's a little lighter than that. We start worrying about supply chain issues. About half of the the container board is made out of paper mill and shipped by rail to a box plant. And rail isn't quite as fast and efficient as an LTL, or will actually be a full truckload. But you can carry more rolls by rail than you can buy a truck. So you kind of have to have a little bit more of that time to allow for the transit for those rolls.

• 21:55Tracy Alloway?

  What's your take on why paper companies are actually increasing prices? Even, you know, when inventory seems to be high and demand is going down.

• 22:03Speaker 07

  Well, it's funny you ask that. So four years ago, I started trying to figure out if we could read the tea leaves, so to say. And we put together a mix of inputs and having worked in the industry, we kind of know how the sausage is made. And what we did was we put together this series of inputs and we correlated it back to historic movements. And our algorithm explains 93% of the reasons why prices have moved.

• 22:29Tracy Alloway?

  So Bloomberg has a box pricing algo?

• 22:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, so B C B C I index for people who are on the terminal.

• 22:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I'm pulling this up right now. B C, keep going while B C B. Bloom, wait, what is it?

• 22:43Tracy Alloway?

  B C I.

• 22:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, B C B C I.

• 22:45Speaker 07

  Stands for Bloomberg Corrugated Box Cost Index. And up until this year, when we did our, the the last multiple regression analysis, it had a 93% R square. So it was really good, right? Well, pricing in the industry diverted from our index this year where prices went up, even though costs are going down. And that's actually not a complete anomaly. We did see this in our index a few years back in 2017, 2018, but it wasn't quite as pronounced.

• 23:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, so sorry, just to be clear, because I want to get this right. The index that I'm looking at is the box cost index. So it's not so much that it's measuring the cost of box like. So the box prices can go up even though this line on the chart is rolling over.

• 23:32Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 23:33Joe Weisenthal?

  This is important.

• 23:34Speaker 07

  Yeah. And some might call this kind of organic margin expansion. Others have more colorful words for it. But in the US, 90% of the industry is vertically integrated. And what that means is they have their own paper mills. They move that paper to their own box plants and sell it to their own customers. And so there really isn't much of an open market the way there is in other regions. In other regions, like in Europe, they don't have that vertical integration level. And so there is a much more robust open market. And it drives prices down because of normal supply, demand fundamentals. If you do have just an absolute glut of inventory, prices are going to fall.

• 24:16Speaker 07

  Our best data says globally, we have around 50 million tons of oversupply of container board. Now, we don't have that just in the US. That's a global number. But that does kind of alter your frame of consciousness.

• 24:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, by the way, this is just so fantastic. Everyone should go to Bloomberg Terminal because now I'm reading the PDF that describes how the methodology. The weights, by the way, are the cost of diesel, the cost of caustic soda, natural gas price, US recycled fiber price, corn price index, repair and maintenance, average truck rate, US average hourly earnings. And this is how they derive the cost of what a box. And it walks through all the methodology. It's really fantastic.

• 24:57Tracy Alloway?

  It's so funny to think that corn is an input into boxes.

• 25:01Joe Weisenthal?

  A 7% weight, according to the Bloomberg methodology. The biggest weight is the US recycled fiber price of 37%.

• 25:07Tracy Alloway?

  Makes sense. Just on the inventory, how much of the decline this year in terms of box shipments is just an inventory glut? Do we have like a good read on that versus demand?

• 25:18Speaker 07

  From a box standpoint, we don't have a good read on that.

• 25:21Tracy Alloway?

  Okay.

• 25:22Speaker 07

  If we're thinking about. The grocery store, those boxes turn over very quickly. Having worked in the industry, the box is going to get made at the box plant. It's going to go to a customer. We're going to think like General Mills and Kellogg's and Hershey's and all of the big brand names that we know. It's not going to necessarily sit in their facility for very long. It will maybe get back into the system within 30 days. In fact, I've been to the grocery store and my kids hate it when we go to the grocery store because I'm always turning over boxes to see who made them. But sometimes they will date stamp the boxes as to when they were produced.

• 25:59Tracy Alloway?

  Oh.

• 26:00Speaker 07

  And I've seen as quick as 30 days in the store. And oftentimes when Smurfit Kappa bought West Rock, I was able to see a brand new Smurfit West Rock BMC within 90 days of that transaction. So it's just an interesting little like tidbit. And if you find yourself turning boxes over from now on.

• 26:19Tracy Alloway?

  You're going to start doing that.

• 26:20Joe Weisenthal?

  How stable is the relationship between square footage of boxes and the actual goods sold in boxes? And the reason I ask this is like, you know, I remember the first several times that I ordered groceries, for example, online. And I would get these deliveries as like, this seems really inefficiently packed. Like you get a box and there's two tomatoes in there. And it's like, was this really, did they really need to just have this?

• 26:45Tracy Alloway?

  Amazon is the classic example of this.

• 26:47Joe Weisenthal?

  But I imagine that Amazon doesn't love this either. I imagine they're always trying to optimize for box capacity such that, you know, you buy a new remote control for your candle fire or whatever. It doesn't come in a big box. Do they, is there progress always being made on the efficient use of the cubic footage space within these boxes?

• 27:04Speaker 07

  Yes. All right, so let's talk about two things first. First, we're going to talk about who the consumer is.

• 27:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 07

  And second, we'll talk about right sizing. So first, when we think about consumers, Walmarts, Targets, Amazon, Home Depot, they are consumers. And the majority of boxes that are made are intended for them.

• 27:25Speaker 07

  Not for us. In fact,

• 27:27Tracy Alloway?

  That's why they call them big box stores.

• 27:28Speaker 07

  Right, right. So we can get into this later, but this old box actually has its own aftermarket in which probably 80% of the stuff that we recover comes from those stores, not from our doorsteps. So when we think about consumers, we really need to think about the big stores first because that's who the main consumers of these boxes are. And so when you think about the changes that we're seeing, if we're seeing significant changes at those stores, we may be thinking about things like shrinkflation or companies altering the size of their products and then having to alter the size of the boxes that hold them. So I think while it's an important idea, it's probably less significant than what

• 28:09Speaker 07

  we get at our homes. And Amazon, for instance, let's talk about traditional e-commerce, or I think I may start referring to this as cart to carton commerce.

• 28:20Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, very good.

• 28:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, because e-commerce today, or digital sales, as some people talk about it, can also include things like Uber Eats or Instacart. It could also include a buy online pickup at the store. So a cart to carton commerce might be a

• 28:35Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 07

  better, better way to think about it. Or like a, I don't know, maybe you can come up with a new term.

• 28:40Tracy Alloway?

  I'll, I'll think about it.

• 28:41Speaker 07

  So Amazon, from our best guesses, represents about 8% of all of the boxes made in the US, at least in 2024. And what we're seeing from a lot of these companies who do that kind of traditional e-commerce or the cart to carton, we're seeing a right sizing. So you may have gotten an Amazon box that looks a little bit weird, right? It, it's lightweight, real paper, it's folded in on itself, it's got that zipper pull on it, and it just doesn't quite look like this box on the table that's been taped up and it's a, a regular slotted carton. You may have seen that. Or you may have gotten a paper mailer. And Amazon has really been forging the way in mailers and in packaging technology.

• 29:26Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, what's a paper mailer?

• 29:27Speaker 07

  A paper mailer is a, a bag.

• 29:30Tracy Alloway?

  Oh.

• 29:30Speaker 07

  That is made from paper.

• 29:32Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, I've only ever gotten the plastic ones of those from Amazon. I don't think I've gotten a, oh, wait, no, I probably have with the bubble wrap inside.

• 29:39Speaker 07

  Some of them don't even have bubble wrap anymore.

• 29:42Tracy Alloway?

  Ah, I haven't gotten one of those. Okay, but this reminds me, if I am working in the procurement department of an Amazon or I don't know, a Walmart or someone like that. What are the factors that go into me deciding what boxes I actually want for the business?

• 29:59Speaker 07

  That's going to be a reflection of what your product is. And every product has its own specification of what kind of box it needs. So if you're making a widget, you will determine how many of those widgets are going to go into a box. And that's going to be a function of its weight and fragility and what kind of other internal packaging you might need.

• 30:21Tracy Alloway?

  Let me ask this question in a different way. Why does Amazon, at least historically, seem to like big boxes?

• 30:29Speaker 07

  Well, I don't know that I can answer for Amazon on that one, but it does seem to be maybe at the discretion of people who are packaging at their packing stations and what their available inventory of boxes might be like. I've seen some of these things in action. It's a packet, it's just a small packaging desk of sorts with some overhead bins that have knocked down flat boxes in them.

• 30:52Joe Weisenthal?

  This must be an interesting sort of engineering problem because I might at the end consumer level say, look at this inefficient use of box space. I got a box and all has a little remote control. On the other hand, maybe the optimization occurred because the packer has four boxes to choose from. And if they had more choices, maybe they could have had a more efficient space to good ratio. But then that would have taken up more warehouse space and made that whole process less efficient. So there's probably all kinds of algorithms that I'm not even thinking about as the end consumer here.

• 31:23Speaker 07

  There are lots of algorithms. And when you think about boxes and packaging in traditional e-commerce, they are looking to optimize not just from a packaging standpoint, from like, from a pricing position, but really from a cube in the shipments, right? So we have to think that Amazon is going to process all these orders or Chewy or whatever the e-commerce platform is. They process the orders, they're going to go through their distribution centers. And if you're Amazon, you have your own trucks. You want to make sure that you can put as many of those things on a truck as possible.

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• 35:39Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, when we're talking about broader macroeconomic data these days in particular, there are a lot of questions about the degree to which the aggregates are missing part of the story. And specifically in a lot of commerce these days, anytime there's some retail CEO that like, things are holding up well, but it's really being driven by the high end. The high end is keeping it afloat. The middle consumer is getting squeezed, lower income is getting squeezed, you know, all kinds of things. You know, we're talking in aggregates when you, when you talk about box square footage having been shipped. But is there more granular data that one could look at in terms of the quality of cardboard, et cetera, that could tell us different things about what's strong within the economy, even if the big numbers are declining?

• 36:20Tracy Alloway?

  The fancy boxes.

• 36:21Speaker 07

  Uh, the fancy boxes, not really. Okay. So one of the problems that our industry faces is that we don't have great data. Having worked in the industry and having provided that data. It's a chore that no one really double checks. So you've you've brought on a new customer, right? And you're submitting all your paperwork for the new customer. One of those things is a classification of their NAICS code, the North American Industry Code.

• 36:49Speaker 07

  Well, no one ever checks to make sure that's proper, right? You just kind of wing it. You look it up and see if they've maybe followed it with the Secretary of Commerce or something like that. And and that's it. So the granular data is murky at best, but it is insightful and it is consistent because there is a cost to changing your supplier. Like, we do see it happen. And for very big box customers, they don't like changing. You have a longstanding relationship, typically many, many years. You have lots of SKUs. And if you're a really big company and you have operating facilities all over the place, you don't want to go through that. So the data, while murky, might be consistent. And we do see some of those things.

• 37:33Speaker 07

  Like in 2024, for instance, we saw that manufactured food fell like by 3.7%. So if you combine that with beverage, it was a little over of a 4% decline in box usage. Now, how do we describe that? Did those companies see similar falls in their volume? I think I think the data would suggest that that's probably very close. Corrugated packaging does have some known trade offs. One of those things is a returnable plastic container. That is mainly being pushed right now towards produce. Walmart, specifically Sprouts Market, have been pushing some of their people to adopt returnable plastic containers as a viable option. It reduces waste.

• 38:15Speaker 07

  They're building supply chains around these things to help carry them around. So that is one of the things that we've seen kind of cut into box consumption. We don't know that it's a big thing yet, but it is out there and it is a thing. The other thing that we've seen is a movement to larger format boxes, some that are the size of a pallet, 48 inches long, 40 inches wide, and maybe 40 inches tall. A great playhouse for your young kids.

• 38:42Tracy Alloway?

  I remember doing that with huge boxes, turning them into houses. Why would anyone invest in this space currently? Because when you describe this enormous glut in supply, and then the fact that demand is going down, maybe it's because of the tariffs. Maybe if the US starts manufacturing more goods, it'll domestically, it'll start to pick up again. But it seems like most of the lines are kind of trending in the wrong way. What exactly is like the allure of this industry?

• 39:14Speaker 07

  That's a great question. I wish I knew the answer. Other than they do have dividends that they have been been paying and consistently paying.

• 39:23Tracy Alloway?

  So it's considered like a fairly like stable dividend.

• 39:26Speaker 07

  Very stable dividend. I think it's a pretty safe investment. We do see, I mean, it's a very popular, from from a terminal standpoint, I get Bloomberg clients that reach out all the time. They're looking to figure out if this is still a good investment. And while we don't do buy, sell, hold recommendations, we still see a lot of traffic in these in these lanes.

• 39:46Tracy Alloway?

  Does it just depend on how big your company actually is and how much pricing power you have in the market?

• 39:51Speaker 07

  Well, see, I think that's a myth. I think I think there really isn't pricing power. If there were pricing power, we wouldn't see some of the actions that we're seeing in the in the world today. And what I mean by that is

• 40:05Speaker 07

  there are some mills that make a really robust paper. It performs really, really well. And there are scientific properties to that paper that set it apart from anything else. And yet they aren't getting the premium that they should be getting. Because there is an alternative and it's it's like wanting a Ferrari and selling for a Mustang. They're both great, like, but one obviously has the allure and one has its client base too. And when you can buy a Mustang and it works.

• 40:39Speaker 07

  You're not always gonna wanna buy that Ferrari.

• 40:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, actually, this sort of gets me to where I want to go. First of all, what would be the name of the biggest box or packaging expo in the United States? Like that gets it together somewhere.

• 40:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, in, in big round terms for packaging, pack expo.

• 40:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Where's that, Vegas?

• 40:56Speaker 07

  This gonna be in Vegas this, this year.

• 40:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Maybe we'll go one day. All right, so setting aside the volume and pricing trends, which we take for granted, everyone is curious about. What would be the hot topics right now that would be discussed at pack expo?

• 41:09Speaker 07

  Ooh, sustainability has been a really big topic for a long time and it's matched with

• 41:17Speaker 07

  extended producer responsibility laws. So this is a state by state initiative to basically shift the burden of recycling away from its residents and on to the companies who are creating the waste.

• 41:30Tracy Alloway?

  How does that work exactly?

• 41:31Speaker 07

  So right now, we have a handful of states who've actually passed legislation. Oregon's the first one that, that is really kind of enacting this. And they've set up a fee schedule. They've measured how much waste their state produces in a month or in a year. And they've allocated a certain number of dollars per pound or cents per pound for each one of those commodities. If you're selling something into the state, they are essentially placing a fee on the waste that you're sending in their state. And you have to pay a check to them.

• 42:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Can you talk a little bit more about the economics of recycling? Cause I put a lot of the cardboard I use into the proper, into the proper bin.

• 42:10Speaker 07

  The economics of recycling.

• 42:12Joe Weisenthal?

  But like, but like I'm always, and this goes with any recycling, really, which is that when I think about the labor that actually, when I think about A, the degree of diligence that people, and I would say I'm probably higher than average diligence about proper bin allocation, but I know I'm not perfect. But when I think about the degree of diligence and the inefficiency and then the labor and all of this stuff. And then talk to us, like I, what, when is it actually economical? And when is it just sort of some sort of cargo cult type behavior that people engage in where there's no real purpose?

• 42:44Speaker 07

  Well, most of the time, the recycling fees are paid by taxes. My street, for instance, that was not the case and I had to pay $25 a quarter for a bin. Not, not terrible, but I had to pay for it. The economics in big round numbers work like this. It costs anywhere from about $400 a ton upwards to $700 a ton to go out and do the collections and processing for recovered materials. All of that stuff. So you'll see a truck come and pick up your recyclables. It goes to a facility called a MRF, a municipal recovery facility. And there it's processed and they have lots of lines that sort things out, plastics and metals and papers and all of that stuff.

• 43:24Speaker 07

  And then they produce bales, so a compact cube of sorts of these materials. And then they get sold. So if we were to just use a big round number and say $500 a ton, the net ton that comes out of the MRF only has a street value between $100 to $140 a ton. Yeah.

• 43:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Mary, listening, hearing that right, that sounds terrible.

• 43:48Speaker 07

  That's terrible. And the craziest thing is the corrugated box is what really makes household recycling even work. Because we know from, from data, and this is something we, I challenged several years ago, our best data says that we recycle about 66% of the corrugated boxes in the US. It's a pretty good number. The industry used to say 93% of boxes got recycled. There's no way that's possible, but we don't have the data to say it's lower than 66%. But we do have a methodology that we use to kind of get there. It was actually supported by the National Renewable Energy Lab. You can probably shoot some holes in some of their stuff too, but big point is we know

• 44:29Speaker 07

  that about 60 some percent of these get recycled and we know they have a very robust aftermarket. We process about 35 million tons of old corrugated cartons almost every year. About a third of them are going to go overseas. There are a lot of other countries that want the virgin fiber that we produce here.

• 44:50Tracy Alloway?

  Now that we've revealed the depressing truth about recycling, let me ask a slightly more positive question, which is have there been any cool technological developments when it comes to box making?

• 45:02Speaker 07

  They are constantly patenting boxes, making new equipment to make them faster, improving the, the way we make the paper. We're trying to make stronger paper that's lighter in weight. So if you think about some of these, we'll go back to the EPR laws for a second. Those fees are based on the weight of what you're consuming. So if the companies can buy a lighter weight material, then their fees go down.

• 45:26Speaker 08

  Right.

• 45:27Speaker 07

  So there is a push now to see if we can lightweight the paper, make it as strong, but with less weight. And so these are things that we're going to see really take some shape in the next five to 10 years.

• 45:38Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I'm glad you mentioned export. One of the things that I've noticed whenever I am traveling abroad, even to fairly rich countries, but I definitely notice it when I'm in poorer countries, is that the quality of packaging materials is distinctly worse than here. So and the example that I often notice is, you know, you buy a bottle of water in a US grocery store. It's nice, it's sturdy, it holds its form very well. You buy a bottle of water at, say, a grocery store in Guatemala, where I was a couple of years ago, or Mexico. It's crinkly, it smashes over easily. You can tell that it's a less durable plastic. Is there similar, you know, if I hadn't, if we were to look at the cardboard boxes running through a developing economy such as Guatemala, et cetera,

• 46:23Joe Weisenthal?

  would we see that this is noticeably different than the quality of cardboard that we're seeing here?

• 46:28Speaker 07

  It really depends on what, the technical term is going to be furnish, right? So what are you using to make the boxes? The US has historically been a maker of virgin craft linerboard, meaning they cut down trees, they chip the trees, they turn those chips into new virgin paper. That's actually been declining and reversing. We've seen more and more recycled capacity come online. And because we've still had a very good virgin base, the recycled paper here in the US has been very good. Now, in other countries, they may not have Southern yellow pine. So they are buying our OCC or they're using their own OCC. OCC is old corrugated cartons, sorry. So they're just going to repulp the stuff that they have. And if they start with a low quality box, then they're going to get a low quality paper on the back end.

• 47:14Speaker 07

  And so sometimes they are going to have a lower grade paper. And in other areas of the world, they actually have different definitions for that kind of paper. So they would have different grades of it. And so, yeah, sometimes you get the low grade paper because it's a commodity and it'll work.

• 47:30Tracy Alloway?

  So I just have one more question, just to wrap it all up. Ah, that's a packaging joke. Okay, wrapping it all up, summarizing, what's your prediction for the second half of the year in terms of box shipments?

• 47:43Speaker 07

  We think they're still going to be very challenged. Full year, we're saying they're probably going to be down 2.5%, maybe as high as 3%. It really depends on what happens. A lot of this is stemming from tariffs and policy coming out of the White House. So it really depends on how much confidence some of these companies have as they look forward. We've seen the, the number of containers coming into the US, like the cargo ships was front loaded, right? And now that the tariffs are kind of here, or maybe they're not here, they've been kind of tapering off a bit. It will be very curious to see what happens. But to maybe think about it another way, most Americans buy stuff when they have money.

• 48:27Speaker 07

  And when they don't have money, they put it on credit cards. And we're seeing a records amount of credit card debt. And that's not a great sign for if people are going to spend money. So we don't really think that that's a really hot outlook for even the, for the holidays. Are Americans going to spend money? Probably. Is it going to look exactly like it did in prior years? Probably not.

• 48:48Tracy Alloway?

  All right, Ryan Fox, containers and packaging analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Thank you so much.

• 48:53Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me.

• 49:06Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I learned a lot about boxes.

• 49:08Joe Weisenthal?

  That guy was great.

• 49:09Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 49:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I love Ryan.

• 49:11Tracy Alloway?

  You know, one thing I really like about Ryan and people like that is when they trot out all the numbers off the top of their head.

• 49:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 49:19Tracy Alloway?

  That was really impressive. That was no notes and he had answers for pretty much everything.

• 49:24Joe Weisenthal?

  If someone had asked me how I thought they would measure box shipments, I might have guessed cubic feet rather than square feet. But yes, I wouldn't, you know, all this covering the world stuff. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 49:37Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. And I guess the question over how useful a macroeconomic indicator boxes actually are, it still kind of lingers because we did have retail sales data for the past two months that are available. That came in like pretty resilient, pretty strong despite the decline in box shipments.

• 49:55Joe Weisenthal?

  What was the term he used? Cart to carton commerce?

• 49:58Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I really liked that because it's true, right? What is e-commerce that now encompasses so many different things? So there is this sort of classic e-commerce where you go on a website and you buy a thing and it comes in a box. But then there's of course, you know, buy and you pick up at the store and that's a slightly different variation. Or maybe you get food delivered in a cardboard box, et cetera. So I like the idea of, okay, e-commerce is so broad that if we want to have like-for-like trajectories of some of these used cases for cardboard boxes, we have to maybe get a little bit more granular.

• 50:28Tracy Alloway?

  Well, that reminds me, actually, I think one thing that's still really underappreciated about the packaging industry is how much it feeds into broader inflation.

• 50:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes, yes.

• 50:38Tracy Alloway?

  And this is something, I remember some economists bringing this up during the post-pandemic era. But the interesting thing is now, even though box shipments are going down, prices still seem to be kind of sticky and even going up. So what does that mean for inflation?

• 50:53Joe Weisenthal?

  I always think about this and sometimes it maybe gets a little metaphysical. But when you buy a thing in a grocery store, let's say you buy an avocado. Like, what are you buying when you buy the avocado, right? Because, okay, there is the physical avocado that you might cut open, but then you're buying the time it's spent in a refrigerated space. You're paying rent to those owners of refrigeration.

• 51:12Tracy Alloway?

  Transportation.

• 51:12Joe Weisenthal?

  You're buying the transportation, et cetera. It's interesting to think about any good that you buy, period, ahead of lettuce, et cetera. How little is the lettuce? Whatever even the lettuce means, because there is labor that went into the planting of the lettuce and there is the land of the lettuce, et cetera. So the idea of what are you buying when you're buying something? Often that includes packaging, but often it's just never really clear at all what it is, except this bundle of goods and services.

• 51:37Tracy Alloway?

  I'm buying an entire slice of the economy.

• 51:39Joe Weisenthal?

  You literally are.

• 51:40Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, now that we've gotten into a metaphysical discussion about boxes, shall we leave it there?

• 51:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 51:46Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alockway. You can follow me at Tracy Alockway.

• 51:52Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStoic. Check out Ryan's stuff at Bloomberg Intelligence. A lot of fascinating stuff there. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dash O'Bennett at Dashbot, and Kell Brooks at Kell Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. You can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 52:17Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about boxes, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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