Three things at once, which is why jerky gets treated seriously. Oxygen turns the fat rancid, and that is the flavour complaint customers report first. Moisture moves out through a weak film and the jerky goes tough. Light drives fat oxidation independently of oxygen, so a clear bag under shelf lighting works against you twice. A metallised structure covers all three and is our standard here; foil is the step up. What you get is a shelf life you can put on a retailer's spec sheet and a bag that still eats right at the back of the case.

Plenty of jerky brands use one and it sells, because people want to see the strips before they pay for them. What you give up is the light barrier entirely and, on a basic PET/PE film, most of the oxygen barrier too. If visibility matters more than maximum shelf life, we will quote a clear structure with a real barrier rather than a plain one, and put the opaque option beside it on the same quote. You pick the trade deliberately at quote stage instead of finding it three months into a listing.

It can, and a single pinhole ends the barrier regardless of which film you specified. You paid for shelf life and got none. Where the product has sharp edges, bone or a rigid stick we add a nylon layer, which takes far more puncture and flex than polyethylene on its own. That is the same layer that goes in for vacuum sealing, because vacuum pulls the film tight onto whatever shape is inside. Tell us the hardest item in the bag when you ask for a quote and it is designed in from the start.

Foil will not, because it is solid metal and the detector reads it every time. Metallised film is normally described as too thin to trigger one, but we have seen it stop a customer's line, so we treat it as a risk rather than a safe bet. If your filler runs inline detection, tell us before we quote: clear barrier films contain no metal and pass. Settling that on the quote is what keeps a co-packed run moving, instead of leaving you with a pallet of bags your filler will not put down the line.

Not a weight question. Strips, sticks and cubes at the same weight fill completely different bags, because what decides it is how the pieces stack rather than how dense the meat is. Give us one piece's length, width and thickness and how many go in a bag, and we size it geometrically. Our bag sizing tool takes the same inputs. If the shape is awkward, filling a blank sample bag with your real product settles it in a day, before you have committed a production run to the wrong size.

They do opposite jobs and jerky usually wants one, not the other. An absorber mops up the oxygen sealed inside the pack, which helps against rancidity. A desiccant pulls moisture out, and on jerky that is normally the wrong direction, because dried-out jerky is tough and the moisture is part of what people are buying. We do not supply either; we make the bag. That is the part worth getting right, because a sachet only works inside a real barrier film. On a plain clear bag the absorber exhausts against oxygen coming through the wall, so the film decides whether it was worth using at all.

EVOH is an oxygen-barrier layer and some suppliers call it the standard for meat. It has a catch: EVOH loses oxygen barrier as humidity rises, so it is a poor fit for anything damp, chilled or stored humid. We quote it on request rather than by default. For most jerky a metallised structure gives strong oxygen and moisture performance plus a light block, without that sensitivity and at lower cost. The same protection on the shelf, and one less thing to go wrong in a warm warehouse.

One hundred per design for stand-up, flat and pillow pouches, which are the formats most jerky brands use. Side gusset, quad seal and flat bottom bags start at 500 per design. The minimum follows the bag's construction, not the product, and it counts per design: three flavours at 100 each is a 300-unit order, with no plate charge for the extra two artworks. That is what lets you test a new flavour on a proper printed bag rather than proving it in a plain pouch with a label stuck on.