The Takeaway Packaging Guide for UK Food Businesses

If you just need the short answer: choose takeaway packaging dish by dish, not brand by brand. Dry and saucy solids go in kraft takeaway boxes, anything liquid goes in round soup containers with properly seating lids, plated-style hot food goes in bagasse clamshells, and every hot container needs a way for steam to escape or the food arrives soggy. Then sanity-check the whole thing as cost per cover — packaging is a menu cost like any ingredient. The rest of this guide walks through each decision in order.

Start from the menu, not the catalogue

Packaging catalogues are organised by product type. Your decisions should be organised by dish. List your ten best-selling items and answer three questions for each:

1. How wet is it? Dry (fries, bao), saucy (curry over rice, loaded fries), or liquid (soup, dhal, sauces sold separately)?
2. How hot does it leave the pass? Steaming food in a sealed container turns crisp things soft in minutes.
3. How far does it travel? Handed over the counter, a ten-minute walk, or half an hour in a courier's bag?

Those three answers point at a container type almost every time. Everything else — size, material, print — is refinement.

Matching containers to food types

Kraft takeaway boxes — the default for solids

Leak-resistant kraft boxes with fold-together lids handle the widest slice of a typical menu: rice dishes, noodles, salads, wings, burgers and loaded fries. They're grease-resistant, they stack, and the fold-flat blanks store in a fraction of the space rigid tubs need. Sizes run from single-portion boxes of roughly 700 ml up to sharing sizes past two litres; the numbered sizing system and what actually fits in each is covered in our guide to kraft takeaway box sizes, and the full range is in takeaway boxes.

One honest limit: "leak-resistant" is not "leak-proof". A kraft box holds a saucy curry upright for a normal delivery run; it will not survive being tipped on its side in a bag. Anything that pours goes in a lidded round container instead.

Soup containers — anything that pours

Round paperboard soup containers with press-fit lids are the right call for soups, stews, dhals, curries sold sauce-heavy, porridge and hot desserts with sauce. Common sizes are 8, 12, 16, 26 and 32 oz. Two rules of thumb:

• Fill to 80%. A brim-full container forces the lid off the first time it's squeezed in a bag.
• Lid on, then invert-test one per batch of stock. A two-second check when a new delivery arrives tells you whether the lids from this batch seat properly before a customer finds out.

Bagasse — plated-style and clamshells

Bagasse (moulded sugarcane fibre) plates and clamshells suit food you'd otherwise serve on a plate: grills, full breakfasts, burgers with sides. It's rigid, handles heat well and doesn't go limp under moderate moisture the way thin card can. See bagasse plates for formats, and our explainer on what bagasse packaging is for how the material behaves with very wet or very oily food.

Leak and heat performance

The two failure modes customers actually complain about are leaks and sogginess, and they pull in opposite directions.

Venting is the underrated one. Fries, fried chicken and anything battered should travel in a container that lets steam out — vented clamshells, loosely folded kraft boxes, or a bag left unsealed at the top. A perfectly sealed box keeps food hotter but steams the crunch out of it. The trade-offs, including how much heat you actually lose through a vent, are covered in how to keep takeaway food hot.

The simplest quality win on most menus: pack sauces separately in small lidded pots rather than dressing the dish before a 25-minute journey.

Stacking and delivery apps

If you sell through delivery platforms, your packaging gets stacked, tilted and carried in a cube bag on a bike. Design for that reality:

• Flat, rigid lids stack; domed lids don't. Boxes that stack two-high halve the chance of a tilted journey.
• Bag by weight order — containers of liquid at the bottom, light crisp items on top.
• Seal the outer bag, not just the container. A sticker or a stapled fold signals the order hasn't been opened and holds the stack together.
• Test your worst dish. Pack your saucier order, put it in a bag, carry it around the block and open it. Ten minutes of testing beats a month of one-star "arrived leaking" reviews.

Cost-per-cover thinking

Packaging should be priced into the dish the same way ingredients are. The method:

1. List every packaging item a typical order consumes — main container, sauce pot, napkin, cutlery if offered, carrier bag.
2. Cost each from the case price (case price ÷ units).
3. Sum it as the packaging cost of that cover, and check it against the dish margin.

Worked example shape (your numbers will differ): a main in a kraft box, one sauce pot with lid, two napkins and a share of a carrier bag typically lands somewhere between 25p and 60p per cover depending on sizes and case quantities. That range is fine for most menus — what hurts is not knowing the number, or paying for a premium container on a dish whose margin can't carry it.

Two levers move the number most: buying the right case size (unit cost falls meaningfully at the 500+ case level) and cutting container variety so each SKU turns over fast enough to buy in volume.

A dish-to-container cheat sheet

To make the mapping concrete, here's how a typical mixed menu resolves:

Diagram coming soonCheat-sheet grid pairing common takeaway dishes (curry and rice, soup, burger and fries, noodles, grilled mains, salads, sauces) with the container each one belongs in.

Notice the pattern: most menus resolve to two or three container types doing all the work. If your mapping produces six, some dishes are being over-specified — collapse near-neighbours into the same container and spend the saved SKU budget on better lids.

The handover details that cost nothing

Napkins in every bag, sauces upright in a corner of the box or bagged separately, receipts stapled to the outside rather than steaming inside the bag, and hot and cold items never sharing a bag wall. None of these change your cost per cover by more than a penny; all of them show up in reviews.

A sensible starting order

For a new takeaway or a menu refresh, a day-one kit usually looks like: one kraft box size for mains (add a second size only if your portions genuinely vary), one or two soup container sizes, small sauce pots, napkins and carrier bags. Our Takeaway Starter Pack bundles exactly that mix so you can trade for a few weeks and let real orders tell you which sizes to buy by the case. Match the container to the dish, vent what's crispy, lid what pours — and count it per cover.