Why Is There a Packaging Charge on Your Order? An Honest Breakdown

We’ve been shipping seafood to doorsteps for more than 30 years, and there’s one line item at checkout that generates more questions than any other: the $12.95 packaging charge.

Every so often a customer asks — fairly! — why we don’t just build it into our prices like everyone else does. It’s a good question, and the answer is one of those things that makes more sense the more you know about what it takes to get a bushel of crabs from Crisfield, Maryland to your door in perfect condition. So let’s open up the box.

What’s Actually in That Box

When you buy a book or a t-shirt online, the packaging is a poly bag or a plain cardboard box — less than a dollar’s worth of material. Nobody charges separately for that, and nobody should.

Shipping seafood is a different sport. Your order doesn’t just need to travel — it needs to stay cold for up to two days in the back of a delivery truck in the middle of July. Here’s what that takes:

An insulated cooler. Every order ships inside an insulated foam cooler engineered to hold a refrigerated state for up to 48 hours as long as the box stays sealed. And it’s not the styrofoam you’re picturing: we use an eco-friendly foam that biodegrades over 92% within about four years in a landfill. Conventional styrofoam? Estimates run 500 years or more.

A corrugated outer box. The cooler rides inside a printed cardboard outer that the carrier requires — it’s what lets your package travel UPS’s automated sorting belts without getting hung up. Ours is printed with a QR code you can scan to pull up your exact order details.

Dry ice or frozen gel packs. If your order is frozen, it ships with dry ice — about five pounds on a typical box — which instantly takes the inside of that cooler down to roughly -120°F and slowly burns off in transit. (If your dry ice is gone when the box arrives, that’s normal and by design — it did its job on the road.) If your order is fresh, it ships with food-grade frozen gel packs instead — usually eight to ten of them — because dry ice would freeze fresh product solid. The gels hold everything at a nice chill without freezing it.

Crush paper and tape. We fill the empty space so there’s no air pocket working against the coolant, and seal it up.

We even print the weather forecast for your zip code on the packing slip, so the person packing your order adds extra coolant when they see heat at your end of the trip.

What All That Costs (and What’s Happened Since 2020)

Here’s the part most companies won’t tell you. Our coolers run about $6 to $14 depending on size. The corrugated outer is $1.50 to $2.50. Gel packs cost us around 30 cents each, and dry ice — with delivery and the current surcharge — lands around 70 cents a pound.

And nearly all of it has doubled since the pandemic. A cooler that cost us $3 to $8 in 2020 costs $6 to $14 today. Corrugated boxes: doubled. Dry ice: doubled. Gel packs are up about 50%. Between inflation, oil prices (a key input in foam production), and the cost of trucking materials in, packaging has become one of our biggest expenses.

Put it together: a bushel of crabs shipped in July takes a $14 cooler, a $2 outer, and a dozen gel packs — about $20 in materials before we account for the extra shipping weight those gels add. All in, that summer shipment costs us $22 to $28 to package and keep cold. We collect $12.95.

That’s not a complaint — it’s just the honest math. There is no profit in our packaging charge. Some orders it breaks even, many orders it doesn’t. It exists to offset a real cost, not to recover it fully, and definitely not to pad anything.

So Why Not Just Hide It in the Prices?

Because that would quietly overcharge most of you.

Here’s the thing: one cooler ships your entire order. Whether you buy one pound of crab meat or crab meat plus shrimp plus snow crab clusters, it all packs into a single box with a single set of coolant. Going up a box size adds maybe 10% in packaging cost — not 300%.

Now imagine we built packaging into the price of every product instead. The math only works out if you order exactly one item. Order three or four — and most of our customers shop a la carte, mixing and matching — and you’d be paying for packaging three or four times over while we still only use one box. Keeping it as a single flat charge per order means you pay for exactly what gets used: one cooler, one shipment, $12.95, no matter how many items you add.

It also gives us flexibility we couldn’t offer otherwise. If you pick up at our facility in Crisfield and bring your own cooler, there’s nothing to charge — we just take it off. And VIP Club members get the $12.95 waived entirely on orders of $100 or more, which is one of the quieter perks that adds up fast if you order regularly.

The Bottom Line

We had two choices: bury the cost of packaging invisibly in every product price and let multi-item orders overpay, or put it on the receipt where you can see it, keep it flat and predictable, and let you skip it entirely when it doesn’t apply.

We chose transparency. It’s a little more explaining up front — hence this post — but we think it’s the fairer way to do it. And the next time a box lands on your porch and you crack open that cooler to perfectly cold seafood after two days on a truck, you’ll know exactly what that line item bought.

Questions about packaging or shipping? Reach out anytime — we’re happy to talk through it.