From food to pet supplies to many beauty products, bags are still a common solution for the packaging of many goods.

They’re flexible, save space, and in a lot of cases they’re the easiest way to transport products of certain sizes (or a lot of them at once). The only problem with this approach, as anyone who’s tried to carry too many groceries inside at once can tell you, is that bags tend to be a little…fragile if overstuffed.

Any warehouse that deals in bagged goods needs to be made aware of how to safely and carefully story these items to prevent damage or product loss—even while stored in a pallet, bagged goods still account for a large amount of loss and damage inside warehouses, but this can be avoided with careful planning.

The first thing to consider is stacking order. Bags, as you can imagine, shouldn’t be stacked with a ton of weight on top of them, even if the other products are also bagged goods. Since anything that comes in a bag isn’t going to be denser than, say, dog food at most, improper stacking order can lead to a lot of damaged products and torn bags, which is a mess nobody wants to clean up.

Stacking order can help a lot with another common issue with bagged goods, which is improper picking. In a lot of cases, bagged products are kept on standard pallet racks or wire shelving like anything else, but many workers can get in the habit of picking the bags closest to them (which are usually a few from the top) as opposed to the bags on top, which is poor picking strategy for any good but particularly for something with less-durable packaging. Train all your workers to level out the stacks on your warehouse shelves and take bagged goods from the top-down to prevent injury—and remember to only stack them three pallets deep when able.

Additionally, this idea may not work with all warehouses or product types, but in a lot of cases you should try to avoid using machines to move bagged goods. Obviously this will depend on the weight involved, but the vast majority of accidents involving either individually bagged products or entire pallets stems from improper forklift use—as you can imagine, their packaging is a little more prone to tears due to forklift and lifter usage. Try to move as many bagged products manually as possible to make sure nothing gets damaged or torn during transport.

Finally, make sure that all bagged goods are stacked accordingly. If your items are being shipped to you in a pre-defined stack, you may need to open and re-order it to work with the rest of the items you’re already storing—and it helps you get everything stacked as optimally as possible for FIFO/popularity-based picking.

With these tips, hopefully your warehouse will experience fewer damaged bags, damaged goods, and lost productivity.