Two different buyers ask this question and they need opposite answers. One is buying cartons to resell or to hand to a moving crew. The other is packing a known product set. Work out which you are first.
If you are supplying the moving trade
Match the standard. The moving industry runs on a small family of recognised carton sizes, and a dish pack that does not match them creates friction for everyone downstream: estimators quote in cubic feet, crews stack by known footprints, and storage racking is built around them.
| Trade carton | Industry-typical size | Approximate volume |
|---|---|---|
| Small | about 16 x 12 x 12 in | about 1.5 cu ft |
| Medium | about 18 x 18 x 16 in | about 3.0 cu ft |
| Large | about 18 x 18 x 24 in | about 4.5 cu ft |
| Dish pack | about 18 x 18 x 28 in | about 5.2 cu ft |
These are published trade figures rather than iBox stock sizes. Print your brand on that footprint and you get recognition without asking anyone to change how they work.
If you are packing a specific set
Now the standard is irrelevant and the contents decide. Stand your tallest plate or bowl on edge, measure it, and build the cell height from that plus cushioning at the base and clearance at the top. Then lay out the grid. Every divider wall costs one board caliper of internal width, so a grid with more cells needs a wider carton than the arithmetic of the items suggests. Measure the assembled divider set loaded with product, not the product alone.
How full is too full
The most common dish pack failure is not the box, it is the fill. A carton sized generously gets loaded generously, and a heavy carton with a weak base fails at the bottom seam. If you are designing the carton, you can control this: a slightly smaller cavity physically limits how much anyone can put in it. That is a legitimate design decision, not a compromise.
The board is the real spec
Double wall is what makes a dish pack a dish pack. It is three liners around two fluted mediums, and the caliper is close to the sum of the two flutes, with BC commonly cited near 9/32 in (about 7 mm). Add one caliper at each wall to get from internal cell dimensions to the external carton. State clearly on your quote which figure you gave.
Cost and lead time
Minimum order is 100 boxes. Price starts from about $0.48 per unit at bulk volumes and is confirmed on your written quote, because a double wall carton with a full divider set prices differently from a plain shipper. The cutting die, the plates, design support, US shipping and a digital proof are included. Production runs from West Chicago in the US and Guangzhou in China, in three lanes: rush (expedited production plus air freight, a premium of about 7 to 25% depending on the job), standard (air), and cost saver (sea), from about 7 business days, plus 2 to 5 for delivery.
For the full method including the cell layout, read how to size a dish pack box. General heavy-duty shippers are on the corrugated boxes page. Tell the quote form which of the two buyers you are, trade standard or product specific, and you will get the right build quoted rather than a generic carton.
