How Much Does It Cost to Manufacture A Stainless Steel Water Bottle?

EcoShine - Stainless Steel Insulated Water Bottle Tumbler OEM Manufacturer
March 17, 2021

What Is Stainless Steel Water Bottle

There are different types of water bottle, including stainless steel water bottle, plastic water bottle, glass water bottle, and silicone water bottle etc.

The stainless steel water bottle has 2 different types;

single wall stainless steel water bottle
double walls stainless steel water bottle

The body part is mainly made by kitchen food grade stainless steel 18-8 (SUS304) , and the lid/cap is made by plastic or stainless steel with silicone sealing gasket.

With double wall stainless steel structure, this water bottle can keep water hot for 12 hours and ice cold for 24 hours, nowadays it is more and more popular in the global markets.

How It Works

How does a double wall stainless steel water bottle keep water hot for 12 hours and ice cold for 24 hours?

There’s a vacuum insulated layer between the double walls to prevent energy transportation from the outside to the inside or vice versa. Therefore, the temperature inside of the water bottle is maintained as long as you wish and you can get hydrated anywhere and anytime.

Insulated water bottle is made from double walls stainless steel with vacuum insulation technology. The vacuum insulation is not a new technology, actually, it was invented by Sir James Dewar in 1892. An insulated bottle consists of two walls stainless steel, which are placed on within the outer and joined at the neck. The gap between the two walls is partially evacuated of air, creating a near-vacuum environment which significantly reduces heat transfer by conduction or convection.

Check more information that 6 reasons are insulated water bottle worth it and 6 best insulated water bottles our picks.

How Much Does It Cost to Manufacture a Stainless Steel Water Bottle?

When you need to create a custom design stainless steel water bottle, you need to know How much does it cost for manufacturing a hydro flask water bottle? And what can affect the cost?

In this situation, you are in the right place here that we Ecoshine Drinkware Limited can help you to find out the important things you should know about Stainless Steel Water Bottle Manufacturing prices costs.

The stainless steel water bottle cost can be varied, which depends on the custom parts design and the order quantities.

There are some basic information of stainless steel bottle pricing that you need to know. For example, product design cost will begin when you set up the project even the production has not been launched yet; the material not only affect the quality but also is the main cost of your custom bottle products; the order quantities could affect a large part of the whole cost and affect the shipment cost for your water bottle products;

You also need to think about:

The timing of your order
The cost of using surface treatment
Labor costs
Any additional cost such as packing cost, shipment cost

To understand more, let’s take a look at each of the things that affect Stainless Steel Water Bottle pricing.

The Cost of Material

The main material list of stainless steel water bottle:

1. Bottle body: stainless steel 18-8 (SUS304), SUS201;

Most of the water bottles and other kitchen drinkware brands are using stainless steel 18-8(also name SUS304), which is widely used in different products with good rust resistance, food grade, bpa free, non-toxic, reusable, recycle, environment friendly features.

2. Bottle cap/lid: plastic (polypropylene or tritan, AS), stainless steel

Most of the bottle caps are made by polypropylene plastic material, which is durable, recycle, food grade, bpa free, and is widely used in tableware products.

Now we can see some stainless steel water bottle brands have started to develop the bottle cap/lid with stainless steel or Tritan material to present high end quality symbol.

3. Seal gasket: solid silicone, liquid silicone

We need to know that the bottle must have a soft seal gasket for the stainless steel water bottle to prevent water leaking issue. The gasket can be made with two types of silicone material, both are food grade, BPA free and reusable. And most of the stainless steel water bottles are using solid silicone for better cost.

The cost of your material is often given per g. The cost of main materials for stainless steel water bottle are:

Stainless steel costs $0.005 per g
polypropylene costs $0.002 per g
AS costs $0.0025 per g
TRITAN costs $0.005 per g
Silicone costs $0.003 per g

It’s important to know that there would have material waste in production, which means your order quantities should be larger and you have to reduce the average waste of raw material for each product by improving the process.

The Cost of Different Order Quantities

The order quantities would have big impact on manufacturing cost, affecting the cost of each stainless steel water bottle;

There are different quantities in general to know the specific prices changed for your order:

MOQ 3000PCS
10000PCS (1% cost down)
30000PCS (2% cost down)
50000PCS (2.5% cost down）
100000PCS (3% cost down)

As you can see, the bigger volume of your water bottle order quantities, the more discount you can obtain.

Also you can save shipment cost a lot with different quantities. For a standard size 17oz/500ml stainless steel water bottle, you can choose shipment as follows;

less then 100pcs; air shipment, fast but expensive
100~3000pcs; sea shipment LCL slow and expensive
15000pcs; sea shipment FCL 20″ GP container, slow and cheap
30000pcs; sea shipment FCL 20″ GP container, slow and very cheap

The Timing of Your Order

When your stainless steel bottle order quantities are small, and the customer wants them urgently, the prices would be higher than usual.

When your order is one time order and is with urgent time, the prices would be higher than usual.

The Cost of Different Surface Finish:

We can do different custom surface treatments for your stainless steel water bottle inside or outside, depending on your design needs.

There’s no plate charge cost when you only want to apply different Pantone colors with spray painting, powder coating and UV plating.

It would have plate charge cost when you want to have different graphic decorations for your custom design water bottle with different techniques, such as logo printing, logo embossing, water transfer, heat transfer printing, spray transfer printing, air transfer printing etc.

The plate charge cost will start from 30USD to 500USD, sample lead time from 3 days to 15 days.

Here we have cost lists for different surface treatments of stainless steel water bottle:

1. Spray painting: 0.15USD/each color

2. Powder coating: 0.50USD/each color

3. Heat transfer printing: 0.15USD(painting base) + 0.10USD (printing)

4. Painting transfer printing: 0.50USD

5. Water transfer printing: 0.40USD

Here you can find out different surface treatments for custom graphic……

Thinking of Labor Cost

The labor cost does keep increasing year by year and we need to think of the labor cost from the bottle design to reduce the product unit cost by using artificial manufacturing process.

Additional Cost

Packaging cost; with some special products which need a custom design packaging , it will surely cause additional cost.
Shipment cost; air shipment, sea shipment, express shipment is different cost per KG, we are working with DHL/FEDEX/UPS and other forwarders to have competitive cost for your shipment.

The Production Manufacturing Process

Production Manufacturing Processes:

Vacuum Insulated Stainless Steel Water Bottle

Purchase raw material
Cutting stainless steel tube
Shape forming with water swelling (or deep drawing forming)
Cutting into 2 pieces
Mouth forming with threads
Matching and welding the mouth of stainless steel flask (the out wall and inner wall join together then do Laser welding)
Welding the bottom cap and with an attachment of Getter
Vacuum process inside the vacuum machine is about 4 hours, creating vacuum insulated layer between the double walls stainless steel
Vacuum Test (measure the stainless steel vacuum flask to see whether it is of good quality or faulty on vacuum insulation) 100%
Electrolysis for the inside of the stainless steel vacuum insulated flask (it can clean the dirty to have nice surface, also create a layer on the inner surface to have good corrosion prevention)
Inspection of electrolysis quality 100%
Polishing the surface of outer wall of the stainless steel insulated flask
Inspection of Polishing quality 100%
Vacuum insulation test 100% second time
Decoration (spray painting, powder coating, water transfer painting, heat transfer printing, logo printing or laser engraving etc.)
Assembly with caps, cleaning, inspection, packaging
Perform final QC inspection

Get Your Custom Insulated Water Bottle

We Ecoshine Drinkware Limited have sales & engineer team to support you to develop a custom design stainless steel water bottle from concept design, prototype sample, tooling development, trial run production, mass production to final shipment with high quality products and fast delivery, here you can reach us to get a quote to know how much to manufacture your stainless steel water bottle.

Double wall insulated water bottles
Custom insulated water bottle
1. 01. Customized Water bottles with pictures
  1. Custom water bottles Labels
  2. Custom Engraved Water bottles
  3. Custom embossing insulated water bottles
02. Custom color insulated water bottle
03. Personalized insulated water bottles in bulk
04. Build tooling to make a custom insulated water bottle
Custom packaging insulated water bottle