Glossary
Co-packer vs Co-manufacturer vs Private Label vs Tolling
A glossary for CPG brand ops. Not a plant census. Not a legal textbook. Ignore the homepage noun. Ask who owns the formula, who buys the ingredients, and which process the line actually runs.
The four terms (food, not cosmetics)
Textbook split: a co-packer packages bulk product you already made; a co-manufacturer / contract manufacturer makes the product from your formula, then packs it; private label is the plant’s formula under your (or a retailer’s) brand; tolling is a fee to run your materials or your filled pack through their equipment.
| Term | What they do | Who owns the formula | Who buys inputs | Food example (already on our process pages) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Co-packer (contract packager) | Fill, label, case, kit. Strictly: they do not cook your recipe. | Brand | You ship bulk + often pack | Minimus (Newbury Park, CA) pack-out from $2,500/project — they do not hot-fill, pasteurize, or run aseptic. IBR (Carrollton, TX) fills hot sauce and powders into sachets, pouches, and stick packs; published floor 5,000 units. |
| Co-manufacturer / contract manufacturer | Blend, process, and pack your spec in their plant. | Brand | Plant (turnkey) or you (toll commercial) | Sauce: Chelten House, Stir Foods, Creative Foodworks (San Antonio; hot-filled / acidified; 1,000 gallon floor, quarterly). Hot-fill beverage: InnoMark (St. George, UT; 7,500 L). Retort pouch: Thermal Kitchen (Daytona Beach; spouted 2–16 oz). MOQ unpublished at Chelten and Stir — unpublished ≠ small. |
| Private label | Plant’s catalog SKU; you (or a retailer) change the label. | Plant / retailer catalog | Plant | Same ketchup, new label — Fresh Factory’s example. On our pages: Berner and AmeriQual publish private-label programs next to co-man; El Pinto lists private label / co-pack for salsa and sauces (floor 10,000 units/year). You do not own a proprietary formula. |
| Tolling | Fee for labor + equipment. Two food uses: (1) you supply ingredients and they cook/fill; (2) you fill elsewhere and they run one process step. | Brand | You | HPP juice / dip: APC (Milwaukee, WI; West Sacramento, CA) and HPP Food Services (Buena Park / Wilmington, CA) take sealed cases, run the cycle, return product. Numeric HPP-toll MOQ: unpublished. |
| Fill + process (vs a toll) | One roof blends, fills, then runs the kill step. | Brand | Plant or you | HPP: Universal Pure Meriden, CT and Mira Loma, CA — rotary fill + HPP. Beverage copack floor 20,000 bottles/run. Their other sites (Lincoln, Villa Rica, Arlington, Malvern, Delphos) are HPP + cold chain, no beverage rotary fill — that is tolling. Same company, two models. |
On a small screen, scroll the table sideways. Cells are not smashed.
The blogs stop at “pack vs make.” In food, the next question is the kill step. Hot-fill sauce is not a retort pouch is not HPP juice.
Which process page to use next
Pick the process. Then pick the plant.
| If your SKU is… | Use this page | Not this |
|---|---|---|
| Refrigerated juice, smoothie, dip, guacamole, baby-food pouch, RTE that must stay cold | HPP co-packers in the US — decide fill+HPP vs tolling first | Hot-fill (heat kills the claim). Retort (ambient sterility; spores survive HPP). |
| High-acid juice, tea, shot, or sauce that can take 185–200°F and must be ambient | Hot fill co-packers | HPP (still refrigerated). Retort (overkill if pH holds ≤ 4.6). |
| Low-acid ambient meal, broth, plant milk, pouch / can / tray — pH > 4.6, commercially sterile | Retort co-packers | HPP. Juice hot-fill lines. Big Brands retort floor is 100k units/SKU, not a startup pack-out. |
| Sauce or condiment (hot fill, kettle, acidified; retort if cheese / cream / broth) | Sauce / condiment contract manufacturers | A 25-gallon launch at Chelten House. Parish 25/50 gal and The Spice Guy 50 gal/flavor are the published small sauce floors. |
| First run, published floor you can fund | Food co-packers with small MOQs | Inventing an HPP or national-sauce minimum. Those pages mark them unpublished. |
On a small screen, scroll the table sideways. Cells are not smashed.
Queued, not live. Do not RFQ as if we have the file: acidified / salsa / hot-sauce as its own page, stick-pack / powder / VFFS, aseptic / ESL / cold-fill, and a state / freight page. IBR and InnoMark already sit on the small-MOQ and hot-fill pages if that is the line you need.
What these terms are not
Not a broker. A broker takes a cut to match you. CoPack Connect’s own FAQ says it is “neither a manufacturer nor a broker.” We are not one either.
Not a CoPack Connect RFQ login. That product is a logged-in AI match. Their hot-fill and retorting URLs still name zero plants.
Not a 3PL. A 3PL warehouses and moves finished goods. Cold storage next to an HPP vessel is a plant add-on, not the process.
Not interchangeable with “white label.” Fresh Factory treats white label as a CPG brand buying a catalog SKU. Same ownership problem as private label: you do not own the formula. We do not have a white-label page.
Request an intro
If a plant on a process page matches your process, pack, and published floor, we can introduce you. Open a manufacturer page and request the intro there. We will not email a plant until you name one and ask.
If you do not know the process yet, say that in the request instead of asking us to “find a co-packer.”
Sources
Definitions we lean on (fetched 21 Aug 2026), then our process pages for the food examples:
- The Fresh Factory — Co-Man, Co-packing, Private Label, or White Label (1 May 2026)
- LegalClarity — Co-Packer vs. Contract Manufacturer. We do not use their unsourced MOQ ranges.
- Private Label Supply — Co-Manufacturing vs Co-Packing (updated 10 May 2026). We do not use their unsourced case / bar ranges.
- CoPack Connect glossary
- Our process pages: HPP · hot fill · retort · sauce · small MOQ
Not used as plant facts: CoPack Connect parking-spaces; extension copacker lists; cosmetics or electronics examples; invented search volumes.