Throughout the summer, pantry shelves’ worth of home-grown produce travel through Omniva parcel lockers. How can you make sure food arrives safely?
Throughout the summer, home-grown produce and homemade goods are sent through Omniva parcel lockers. Omniva reminds customers that it is important to ensure food reaches the recipient safely and intact.
“During the summer, we see more and more shipments coming directly from gardens, forests, and home pantries. While products such as eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, or cakes should not be shipped at all, many other items can be sent safely if they are packaged correctly. Poor packaging means fresh produce can be crushed, while bottles of juice or jars of jam may break. It only takes one broken bottle of juice to damage not only your own shipment but also many other parcels travelling through the sorting line,” says Modris Dambergs, Head of Sorting at Omniva Latvia.
According to Dambergs, many people mistakenly believe that a courier transports a parcel directly from one parcel locker to another. In reality, every parcel passes through a sorting centre, where it travels alongside thousands of other shipments. This means the packaging must withstand both automated sorting and transportation.
Improperly packaged food shipments become noticeable very quickly. Omniva employees are all too familiar with the smell of spoiled mushrooms or fruit flies gathering around leaking or spoiled parcels. The most common problems involve shipments containing liquids, such as juice, jam, honey, oil, or sauces.
During the season, beekeepers also send live bees, anglers send fishing bait, and hunters ship game meat. Such items may only be sent if they comply with the applicable packaging requirements. Parcels must be securely sealed and adequately protected with cushioning material.
“Grandmothers can certainly send homemade jam to their grandchildren, but it all starts with proper packaging. If your parcel contains fragile or breakable items, we recommend choosing the Fragile service, which ensures the shipment is sorted manually. We encourage people to keep sending parcels, but to take extra care when packing them so recipients can truly enjoy what arrives,” adds Dambergs.
Which products must not be sent?
Omniva’s website provides a list of goods that are prohibited from being sent through the company’s parcel services. These include perishable food and food that requires refrigerated storage. The full list of prohibited items is available on the Omniva website.
How should parcels be packaged?
Packaging must be durable and suitable for the chosen method and duration of transport. Packaging that is too small may not withstand pressure and can break, while packaging that is too large allows the contents to move around, increasing the risk of damage. Packages should not have protruding parts such as loose flaps, strings, or straps, and square or rectangular boxes are recommended instead of round packaging.
If the contents are fragile or may break if dropped or subjected to pressure, they must be packed so they do not come into contact with the inside walls of the outer packaging. The space between the inner and outer packaging should be filled with sufficient cushioning material.
For particularly fragile shipments, customers are advised to choose the Fragile service, which ensures manual sorting instead of automated processing. Omniva also recommends marking the parcel with the appropriate Fragile label or pictogram, both of which are available on the Omniva website.
Omniva’s parcel packaging guide is available here.