How a Barossa winery cut cellar carton spend and reclaimed storage space with a recycled stack-and-nest tote
A Barossa Valley (SA) winery and cellar door.
The operator
This is a Barossa Valley winery with a busy cellar door and a small finished-goods operation, picking stock for sales and shuttling bottling-line parts around a working cellar. Like a lot of wineries, it runs a damp, humid environment back-of-house, and it has a sustainability story it wants its packaging to support. They asked us for a mid-depth storage tote that would stack full and nest empty to manage space, hold up in cellar conditions, and carry recycled content they could point to.
The problem with the old handling
Cellar-door stock and bottling-line parts were being stored and moved in cardboard cartons. In a humid cellar, cardboard is the wrong material: it absorbs moisture, goes soft, loses rigidity and fails — so boxes were collapsing under stored weight and being thrown out and re-bought constantly. Empty cartons also could not nest, so they occupied as much shelf and floor space flattened-and-stacked as they were worth, eating room in a space that was always tight. And single-use cardboard ran directly against the environmental positioning the winery wanted to project.
Why this product
They chose the 32 L Solid Plastic Crate (BPB-AP7R): a 645 x 413 x 210 mm stack-and-nest tote moulded from recycled plastic, food-grade and washable, that stacks rigidly when full and nests down when empty. The stack-and-nest geometry is the heart of it — full crates stack securely for storage, and the moment they are emptied they nest into one another to reclaim space, which is exactly the flexibility a tight cellar needs. The washable food-grade surface handles bottling-line parts and cellar-door stock cleanly and survives the humidity that was rotting cardboard. And the recycled-plastic construction gives the winery genuine recycled content to put behind its environmental messaging, turning a packaging line into part of the sustainability story rather than working against it.
The rollout
They brought the totes in for finished-goods picking and back-of-house transfers and let the cardboard run down. The crew immediately noticed the crates held up in the cellar where boxes had been collapsing, and the nesting habit took no training — empties simply got pushed together and stacked back, freeing shelf space straight away. The food-grade surface meant the same tote could move bottling-line components one day and cellar-door stock the next, wiped down between uses, so the winery did not need separate boxes for separate jobs. The recycled content also gave the cellar-door team something concrete to mention to visitors asking about the winery's environmental practices.
The estimated result
We frame the savings as estimates because they depend on how much carton spend the winery was carrying and how heavily the totes cycle. The core economics are straightforward: a durable recycled tote replaces cardboard that was being binned and re-bought every time it got damp, and it lasts many cycles longer in a humid cellar. We estimate the crates pay back against ongoing carton spend within roughly 12-18 months and outlast cardboard many times over. Nesting the empties reclaims an estimated 55% of the storage footprint that flattened boxes had occupied between uses, and the recycled content quietly supports the winery's packaging-waste reduction story at no extra cost.