Why Packaging Prices Have Been All Over the Place — And What Irish Businesses Can Do About It

If you run a takeaway, café, or catering business in Ireland, you will have noticed it: the price of a case of disposable cups, a bundle of pizza boxes, or a box of napkins has not been the same two years running since 2020. Some things went up sharply. Some came back down — a little. Others stayed stubbornly high while the ingredients they carry somehow got cheaper. It has been confusing, and for many businesses, quietly damaging to margins.

This piece explains exactly what happened — and what Irish food businesses can do to protect themselves from the next shock.

The COVID-19 Shock: How a Virus Broke the Packaging Supply Chain

Before 2020, global packaging supply chains were finely tuned for efficiency. Factories in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia ran at high utilisation, producing at low cost for customers worldwide. Lean inventory management meant buyers held minimal stock. Everything arrived just-in-time.

Then COVID-19 hit, and the system broke in three places at once.

For Irish packaging buyers, this translated to price increases of 30–80% on many standard lines between 2020 and 2022. A case of 500 kraft SOS bags that cost €18 before COVID was costing €28–€32 by late 2021. Foil containers, which are almost entirely sourced from Asia, saw even steeper rises. And because packaging suppliers were dealing with the same cost pressures, they had little choice but to pass the increases on.

The China Problem: Why Irish Packaging Is So Dependent on One Country

The pandemic exposed something that had been quietly building for decades: Ireland — and Europe generally — is deeply dependent on Chinese manufacturing for disposable food packaging. Understanding why this happened is key to understanding what comes next.

How China came to dominate packaging manufacturing

Through the 1990s and 2000s, Western packaging manufacturers found themselves unable to compete with Chinese factories on cost. Labour was dramatically cheaper. The Chinese government invested heavily in manufacturing infrastructure — ports, roads, industrial zones — and offered favourable tax treatment for export industries. European factories, facing higher wages, energy costs, and environmental compliance, closed progressively or shifted to premium-only production.

By 2010, the majority of disposable cups, foil containers, plastic lids, wooden cutlery, and many paper-based packaging formats sold in Ireland were either manufactured in China directly or from Chinese raw materials processed in third countries. This was not a secret — it was just the logical outcome of price-driven procurement.

The risk nobody priced in

The efficiency of global just-in-time supply chains left no buffer for disruption. When Chinese production slowed, Irish businesses had days of stock rather than weeks. The fragility became visible overnight.

It is worth noting that the dependency on China extends beyond packaging itself. The raw materials that go into "European" packaging — pulp for paper cups, aluminium for foil containers, resin for plastic lids — are often sourced from or processed via Chinese supply chains. A disruption to Chinese manufacturing cascades across the entire supply chain, even for nominally European-produced goods.

Container Shipping: The Invisible Price Driver

Most packaging buyers never thought about container shipping until it became the dominant story in their cost base. Understanding how it works explains why packaging prices respond so violently to shipping events — and why the effects linger long after freight rates fall.

The key thing to understand about shipping costs and packaging prices: the effect is not instantaneous and not symmetric. When shipping rates rise, packaging prices follow within 2–3 months as supplier stock purchased at high freight costs flows through. When shipping rates fall, packaging prices take longer to come down — often 6–12 months — because suppliers are working through stock purchased at higher cost and are reluctant to compress margins.

This means Irish businesses experienced the full pain of the 2021 spike, but only captured a fraction of the 2023 fall before new disruptions — including the Red Sea shipping rerouting caused by Houthi attacks on vessels in late 2023 and through 2024 — pushed rates up again.

Raw Material Inflation: Paper, Aluminium, and the Energy Factor

Container shipping costs were the headline, but raw material inflation compounded the problem. Three materials matter most for Irish food service packaging:

Why Ireland Is Moving Towards Sustainable Packaging — And It Is Not Only About the Environment

The shift towards sustainable packaging in Ireland is accelerating for multiple overlapping reasons — environmental values are one part of the picture, but supply chain resilience and regulation are equally important drivers.

Regulation: The push you cannot ignore

The EU Single-Use Plastics Directive banned expanded polystyrene food containers, plastic cutlery, plastic straws, and plastic plates across all EU member states — including Ireland — from 2022. This was not optional, and it forced an immediate switch for any business still using the banned materials.

The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), working through the European legislative process, will extend requirements further — including mandatory recycled content percentages, reusability targets, and restrictions on certain packaging formats. Irish businesses that transition to sustainable alternatives now will face lower compliance costs and disruption when these rules arrive.

Supply chain resilience: The case for sourcing closer to home

COVID demonstrated the fragility of 12,000km supply chains. Sustainable packaging — particularly bagasse, paper-based, and locally produced compostable alternatives — often has a shorter, more diversified supply chain than the polystyrene and plastic it replaces. European bagasse manufacturing capacity has grown substantially since 2020, partly in response to the instability of Chinese supply.

A shorter supply chain means more predictable lead times, less exposure to container shipping volatility, and the ability to hold less buffer stock — a real operational benefit for businesses that were burned by the chaos of 2021.

Consumer preference: The Irish market is shifting

Irish consumer attitudes to packaging have shifted markedly since 2019. Bord Bia data consistently shows sustainability rising as a purchasing factor — particularly among the 25–45 age group that dominates food delivery app usage. For takeaways competing on Deliveroo and Just Eat, packaging is one of the few visible brand touchpoints the customer interacts with. A polystyrene burger box signals something different than a bagasse box, and Irish consumers are increasingly aware of the difference.

What Irish Businesses Can Do Right Now

Packaging costs are unlikely to return to pre-2020 levels. The combination of higher raw material costs, ongoing regulatory compliance requirements, and a less stable shipping environment means Irish food businesses need to build smarter packaging strategies rather than waiting for prices to normalise.

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