Cost-per-pallet, not cost-per-roll: the metric that matters

Cost-per-pallet is the total cost of getting one load wrapped to a standard that survives the journey. It has four parts: the film consumed, the operator or machine time spent applying it, the damage and rejected loads that follow when the wrap fails, and the labour of rewrapping. Roll price is an input to the first part only. It is the number most operations manage, and it is the smallest one.

The arithmetic is not difficult. Weigh the film cut off a finished pallet and multiply by what you pay per kilogram. Add the operator minutes at your own labour rate. Then add the cost of damaged and rewrapped loads, spread across the pallets you shipped in the same period. The figure that falls out is usually higher than anyone in the building expected.

Low-yield film forces over-wrapping. If a film will not stretch far and does not hold once it is on, the operator adds revolutions until the load looks safe. You have then paid for thickness that adds no containment, and paid again in machine time and shift capacity. The roll was cheap. The pallet was not.

There is a second leak, upstream of the pallet entirely. Rolls are sold by stated metres, and stated metres are not always delivered metres. Film you pay for and never receive never reaches a load, so it never appears as a wrapping cost. It quietly raises the price of every metre you did receive, and no one on the line ever sees it.

Toreto ran its own wrap test in August 2026: one pallet, one machine, the same power stretch and tension settings throughout, with the film cut off and weighed after every run. Solid 23µ film held 9.9 kg/sq in on 200 g of film, at roughly €0.48 a pallet. Dropping to 20µ gave the same 9.9 on 174 g, about €0.42. At 17µ it was still 9.9, on 140 g, about €0.37.

Supersonic and Aerosonic at 16µ held 10 kg/sq in on 66 g, at about €0.32 a pallet. That is the containment of the 23µ solid film for roughly a third of the material, because the reinforced films ran around 50% fewer revolutions to get there. These are Toreto's own measurements rather than estimates, and the cash figures move with film price and pallet size.

In the same test, 12µ nano film wrapped the pallet on 91 g for about €0.32 — the lightest, cheapest single pass on the sheet. It also produced the weakest result: 7.6 kg/sq in. Nano is a finely tuned film. It needs a machine in good order and settings that are exactly right, and when anything is off it fails rather than degrading gracefully.

So in practice most users wrap it twice. Two passes lift the holding to 11.9 kg/sq in, but the pallet now carries 182 g and costs about €0.64, and the wrapper turns out half as many pallets a shift. Against Supersonic at 10 kg/sq in and about €0.32, that is 50% slower and 50% more expensive. The cheap line item became the expensive pallet.

Toreto's second measured test ran in the field in the United Kingdom in August 2026, in pounds. A pallet that had arrived machine-wrapped with several film failures had its film cut off and weighed: 181 g, £0.60 of film, two minutes of wrapping, £0.40 of labour — £1.00 to wrap that pallet. The same pallet, rewrapped by hand with the Hyper Wrap System, took 151 g, £0.54 of film, one minute and £0.20 of labour: £0.74.

Read the two lines against each other and you can see where the money actually moved. The film cost fell six pence. The labour fell twenty. Total cost fell 26%, and the pallet was finished in half the time. Labour on both lines is the same operative at £0.20 a minute, the rate Toreto's UK partner confirmed; put your own rate in and the gap changes shape but not direction.

One caution on that test, because it is the figure people misread: the 50% saving is in metres, not in weight. Half as many metres went onto the load, because the film is stronger and wider. The weight only fell from 181 g to 151 g. Anyone who weighs the film off both pallets and expects half will think the claim was rounded.

Cut and weigh the film off three finished pallets — a routine one, a heavy one and an awkward one — and take the average. Time the wrap with a stopwatch rather than from memory. Pull the last three months of damage claims and rewraps out of the system, and divide by the pallets shipped in those months. That is a baseline you can defend in front of a finance director.

Then multiply, because that is where the argument is won or lost. At 20,000 pallets a month, closing a 40p-per-pallet gap is roughly £96,000 a year on wrap alone. Toreto's cost-per-pallet calculator runs the same sum against your own volumes, film price and damage rate, so you can see the shape of the prize before anyone changes a roll.