Solid vs perforated pallet wrap: when breathability wins

A solid stretch film is an airtight plastic skin. Whatever heat and moisture the load carries at the moment it is wrapped stays inside. If the goods are warmer than the air around them, the vapour they give off migrates to the coldest surface it can reach — the inside face of the film — and condenses there as free water.

That water runs back down onto the load. It rusts can crowns and lids, softens corrugated cases until the stack loses its own structure, lifts labels and print, and grows mould on anything organic. None of it is visible until the pallet is opened at the far end, which is exactly where loads get refused.

A load needs breathability when it enters the wrap at a different temperature from the place it will sit, or when it generates heat and moisture of its own. Hot-filled cans and jars, bakery still cooling, cheese, chilled and frozen goods crossing a warm dock, and fresh produce that keeps respiring long after harvest.

Blast chilling and freezing are the clearest case. Cold air has to reach the product to take heat out of it, and a sealed film puts a plastic wall in the way, so the outer cases cool while the core lags behind. Perforated film lets cold air pass through the pallet, so the product reaches temperature sooner and the chamber turns around faster.

A solid film is the right answer for dry, ambient, stable goods already at the temperature of the building around them — bagged granules, hardware, building products, tinned goods filled and cooled days ago. Nothing is condensing inside those pallets. Perforation there buys airflow the load has no use for.

Perforated film is punched flat, on the roll. What matters is what happens next. As the wrapper power-stretches the web onto the load, the holes should draw open into real apertures and stay open on the finished pallet, with the reinforcing strands between them intact and still carrying the containment force.

In our own team's field experience, this is where most perforated film on the market falls down. It looks identical on the roll and on the datasheet, but the base material will not stretch, so the holes barely open as the film is applied. The buyer pays for perforation and gets a fraction of the airflow. Aerosonic is built the other way round: the film stretches, the apertures open, and hole size and perforation count are engineered to the load.

It is the obvious worry — cut holes in a wrap and you cut its grip. It does not follow, because containment comes from the structure of the film rather than from an unbroken skin. Reinforcement built into the web carries the load; the open area sits between the reinforcing bands, not through them.

Toreto's own comparative wrap tests, August 2026, ran the same pallet on the same machine at the same power stretch and tension settings. Supersonic and Aerosonic at 16 microns held 10 kg/sq in using 66 g of film per pallet. A 23-micron solid film reached 9.9 kg/sq in and needed 200 g, at roughly €0.48 a pallet against €0.32.

The reinforced films also ran roughly half the revolutions, so the same wrapper puts out twice as many pallets in a shift. These are Toreto's own measurements rather than estimates, and the cost per pallet will move with your film price and your pallet size.

Supersonic, the solid reinforced film, and Aerosonic, the macro-perforated breathable one, are made from the same materials and perform the same. The practical consequence surprises most buyers: a line can move from solid to breathable, or back again, at the same cost per pallet and without touching the machine settings.

That is not how the breathable category usually behaves. Other breathable films on the market typically cost up to 100% more in use than the solid film they replace, and need their own machine settings to perform acceptably. It is why breathability gets treated as an expensive special case instead of a normal option — and why, here, a trial costs a shift rather than a project.

The decision is easy to settle empirically. Wrap one pallet of your real product with your current film and the next with a perforated film, on the same machine and the same settings. Send both through the actual journey, then look at the inside face of the wrap when they arrive. Condensation either formed or it did not.

Application still matters while you test. Apply the inside face of the film to the goods, which has the better adhesion. Two revolutions at the base to lock the load to the pallet, spiral up with a 20–30 mm overlap, two revolutions at the top, and enough tension to secure without crushing. On heavy or unstable loads, spiral back down as well — the criss-cross adds stability on slippery goods.