What Does a Custom Food Pouch Actually Cost? A Real Factory Breakdown

Most packaging suppliers will give you a unit price. Very few will show you how they got there.

We're going to do something different.

Below is a complete cost breakdown for a real bag we produce — a retort pouch for cooked soybean sprouts, a common food service product. The numbers are real. The logic applies to almost any food pouch you might be sourcing.

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The Bag in Question

• Application: Pasteurization / water-boiling pouch for cooked vegetables
• Size: 80mm × 120mm
• Structure: PET / Pure Aluminum / PE
• Thickness: 17 microns per side (combined)
• Production run: 210,000 pieces
• Layout: 3 bags across per roll width (horizontal cut)

This is a food-grade retort pouch — the kind used for products that go through a boiling or pasteurization process after sealing. The aluminum layer provides the barrier performance needed to survive that process while keeping the product shelf-stable.

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Raw Material Costs

This is where most of your unit price comes from.

PET Film

PET is the outer layer. It carries the print and provides structural strength.

• Roll width: 735mm
• Total weight for this run: ~74kg
• Price: ¥8/kg
• Cost: ¥592

Pure Aluminum Foil

This is the barrier layer — the reason the bag can survive boiling and keep oxygen out.

Pure aluminum (as opposed to metallized PET) is significantly more expensive, but it's non-negotiable for retort applications.

• Total weight: ~81kg
• Price: ¥29/kg
• Cost: ¥2,349

This single layer accounts for 25% of total raw material cost. It's why retort pouches cost more than standard food bags — not profit margin, just aluminum.

PE Film

The inner sealing layer. Food-safe, heat-sealable, flexible. This is the layer that touches the product.

• Total weight: ~295kg
• Price: ¥9.2/kg
• Cost: ¥2,714

PE is the heaviest layer by weight because it forms the inner surface of the entire run. At nearly 300kg for 210,000 bags, you can see why inner layer selection matters for cost.

Printing Ink

Calculated by surface area, not weight.

• Print area: 735mm width × 6,000 meters length
• Rate: ¥0.3 per square meter
• Total area: 4,410 square meters
• Cost: ¥1,323

Lamination Adhesive

This bag requires two lamination passes — PET to aluminum, then aluminum to PE.

• Total lamination area: 8,820 square meters
• Rate: ¥0.18 per square meter
• Cost: ¥1,587.60

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Raw Material Subtotal: ¥8,565.60

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Production Costs

Labor

Running a laminating and bag-making line isn't free. Skilled machine operators, quality control, setup time — this gets allocated per roll of film produced.

• Cost: ¥300

Overhead

Facility rent, taxes, packaging materials (cartons), material waste during setup and calibration, utilities.

• Cost: ¥500

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Total Cost: ¥9,365.60

Unit Cost: ¥0.0446 per bag

Factory Price (with 15% margin): ¥0.051 per bag

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Where the Money Goes

The aluminum and PE together account for over half the total cost. This is true for most food pouches with a barrier layer — the material story dominates everything else.

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Why Two Suppliers Can Quote Very Different Prices

Two factories can quote what looks like the same bag at prices 30–50% apart. Here's where the difference usually comes from.

Foil thickness. Pure aluminum comes in different gauges. A thinner foil costs less but provides weaker barrier performance — which matters when the bag goes through boiling water. Some factories spec down the foil to win on price. The bag looks identical. The performance isn't.

Adhesive quality. There are food-grade adhesives and there are cheaper alternatives. For retort pouches that go through heat processing, adhesive failure means delamination — the layers separate, the seal fails, the product is compromised. Good adhesive costs more.

Sealant grade. The PE layer that forms the inner seal comes in different grades. Lower-grade PE can result in inconsistent seals, especially at the corners of the bag. On a 210,000-piece run, even a 0.5% failure rate means over 1,000 defective bags reaching your customer — or worse, your customer's customer.

Yield assumptions. Every production run generates waste — during setup, calibration, and changeovers. A factory that quotes based on optimistic yield assumptions will look cheaper upfront. A factory that quotes honestly accounts for realistic waste. The bags you actually receive are the same. The price you pay might not be.

If you're comparing quotes and one is significantly lower than the others, it's worth asking specifically: what foil gauge are you using? What adhesive specification? These aren't hostile questions — any competent factory should answer them immediately.

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What Some Factories Do to Look Cheaper

This is uncomfortable to write, because we're part of the same industry. But buyers deserve to know.

Some factories quote aggressively low to win the order, then make up the margin quietly:

• Substituting metallized PET for pure aluminum. VMPET looks similar to foil in a finished bag. It costs significantly less. It does not perform the same under heat and pressure. For retort applications, this substitution can cause seal failures after boiling.
• Reducing foil thickness below spec. Impossible to detect visually. Only shows up in barrier testing or — worse — in field failures.
• Downgrading the adhesive system. Common in competitive bidding situations. The bag passes initial inspection, then delaminates under storage or temperature variation.
• Inflating piece counts. Quoting 210,000 pieces but shipping 205,000. Small enough that many buyers don't recount, large enough to matter.

The defense against most of this is simple: ask for material specifications in writing before confirming an order, and request a third-party food safety test report on the finished product. A factory with nothing to hide will provide both without hesitation.

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What This Means for Your Order

A few things worth understanding from this breakdown.

Labor and overhead are a small fraction of total cost. At ¥800 out of ¥9,365, production costs are less than 9% of the total. The story of packaging cost is almost entirely a raw material story. When you negotiate price, you're mostly negotiating material quality.

Scale helps, but less than you might think. Going from 210,000 to 420,000 pieces doesn't halve your unit cost — the raw material costs scale linearly, and the fixed overhead becomes a smaller share of a larger number. You'd save maybe 10–15% on a doubled run, not 50%.

The margin is 15%. Not 40%, not 60%. A factory quoting you significantly above these numbers isn't necessarily being greedy — they might be pricing in risk for a new client, slower payment terms, or uncertainty about reorders. But if you're seeing quotes 40–50% above this, it's worth asking why.

Pouch failure has a long tail. A failure rate of even 0.5% can become a serious problem for importers once goods arrive overseas. At 210,000 pieces, that's 1,050 failed bags. Returns, replacements, and reputational damage from a product recall cost far more than the savings from a cheaper supplier.

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How Does This Apply to Your Bag?

The numbers above are specific to an 80×120mm retort pouch in PET/AL/PE. Your bag will be different — different size, different structure, different function.

But the logic is the same: start with the structure, calculate the material weights, price each layer at current market rates, add production costs, apply margin.

If you already have a quote from another supplier and want a second opinion on whether the pricing makes sense, we can usually give you a rough read within a few minutes. Get in touch with your bag specs or an existing quote and we'll take a look.

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Notes from the Factory Floor — Tongcheng, Anhui Province, China.