As your supplement brand grows, two operational partners become critical: your co-packer (who makes and fills your product) and your 3PL (who stores and ships it to customers). Most founders don't fully understand the distinction until they need both at the same time.
What Is a Co-Packer?
A co-packer blends, fills, seals, and packages your product. They turn raw ingredients and roll stock film into finished pouches. They don't (typically) store your inventory long-term or ship individual customer orders — their job ends when your finished goods are on a pallet.
What Is a 3PL?
A 3PL (third-party logistics provider) receives your finished goods, stores them, picks individual orders, packs them into shipping boxes, and hands them off to carriers (UPS, FedEx, USPS). They're the operation between your finished product and your end customer.
A 3PL typically does not make anything. They handle what already exists.
The Difference in Plain Terms
| Function | Co-Packer | 3PL |
|---|---|---|
| Blending ingredients | Yes | No |
| Filling pouches / sachets | Yes | No |
| Storing finished inventory | Sometimes (short term) | Yes |
| Picking individual orders | No | Yes |
| Packing shipping boxes | No | Yes |
| Carrier handoff | No | Yes |
| Tracking shipments | No | Yes |
What 3PLs Actually Cost (The Part Nobody Tells You)
3PL pricing is notoriously opaque. Here's what you're typically paying for:
- Receiving fee — per pallet or per unit received into their warehouse
- Storage fee — per pallet per month, or per cubic foot per month
- Pick fee — per order or per unit picked
- Pack fee — per order, sometimes including materials
- Shipping — often marked up 10–20% above carrier rates
- Monthly platform fee — $200–$500/month in software and account fees, charged regardless of order volume
- Account minimums — some 3PLs require a minimum monthly spend; if you don't hit it, you pay the minimum anyway
A brand doing 200 orders per month might pay $800–$1,500/month in total 3PL costs including platform fees, storage, and pick/pack. A brand doing 50 orders per month might pay nearly as much — because the fixed fees dominate at low volume.
When to Use a Co-Packer for Fulfillment
Some co-packers — including Overgang — offer ecommerce fulfillment as an add-on service. This means your finished goods stay at the production facility and ship directly to customers from there, skipping the 3PL entirely.
This can be significantly cheaper for brands that:
- Are doing under 500 orders per month
- Have simple SKU structures (1–3 products)
- Don't need the advanced routing and carrier negotiation a large 3PL provides
- Want to avoid the overhead of setting up and managing a separate 3PL relationship
Overgang's fulfillment pricing is flat — no monthly platform fees, shipping at actual carrier cost with no markup. For small and mid-size ecommerce supplement brands, that model is often meaningfully cheaper than a traditional 3PL.
When You Need Both
At some point, separating production and fulfillment makes sense:
- You're doing high order volumes that benefit from a 3PL's carrier rate negotiation
- You need multi-location fulfillment to reduce shipping zones
- You have complex kitting or subscription box assembly that your co-packer doesn't handle
- You need returns processing and restocking
For most brands under $1M in revenue, a co-packer with fulfillment capability is simpler and cheaper than managing two separate vendor relationships.
The consolidation argument
Every additional vendor is a communication overhead, an invoice, and a point of failure. At the early stage, keeping your production and fulfillment with one partner — if they do both well — is almost always the right call. Add a 3PL when your volume justifies it, not before.