How to Make a Christmas Hamper at Home, Costed Against Buying One

By Dewi Salim, Hamper Building Lead at The Gourmet Pantry.

Making your own Christmas hamper is not usually the cheaper option. I priced the eight items in our $79.95 Foodies Hamper as individual products on our own site and they came to $87.60, before a box, filler, ribbon, card or postage. Build your own for control and personality, not to save money.

The same eight items, priced twice

I build hampers for a living, so the only honest version of this test runs against a box whose contents I know line by line. The Foodies Hamper, one of our alcohol-free ready-made gourmet hampers, is $79.95 and holds eight items. Every one of those eight is also sold on our site as a single pack, so this is close to like for like rather than a guess. Here is what those eight cost bought one at a time.

Prices are the single-pack prices listed on our site as this was written, and in a couple of rows the retail pack size differs slightly from the hamper's own, so check the product pages for the current figure. The direction does not move either way. The loose version costs $7.65 more, and that column is food only. No container, no shredded filler, no cellophane, no ribbon, no card, and no postage.

Why loose items cost more than the finished box

Singles are priced as singles. A hamper is bought and packed in volume, and the box, the ribbon, the gift card and the twenty minutes someone spends at the bench in Corio are already inside the $79.95 rather than sitting on top of it. That is the whole of it, and it is why hamper maths so often runs backwards from what people expect.

Smaller boxes run closer. The six items in our $59.95 Gourmet Bites Hamper come to $59.70 bought one at a time, so the do-it-yourself version saves you twenty-five cents and you still have to buy something to put them in. Line ball is the best result DIY gets on price, and only on the small boxes.

There is one way to make the numbers favour a home-built box, and it is worth naming plainly: change the food. Swap artisan crackers for a supermarket own-brand, drop the Belgian truffles for a block of chocolate, and a box of the same shape and size costs roughly half as much. That is a perfectly reasonable decision, and plenty of well-received hampers get built exactly that way. It is just not the comparison people think they are making when they say a home-made hamper works out cheaper. Like for like, on the same food, it does not.

What building your own actually buys

Specificity, and it is a real advantage. A ready-made box has to please a wide range of households. A box you assemble has to please one, and you know things about that one person that no buyer ever will.

The clearest examples are regional. Sovereign Hill Raspberry Drops at $9.95 are made by hand at Brown's Confectionery Factory at Sovereign Hill in Ballarat. To someone who went there on a school excursion they are not a lolly, they are a memory, and no national gift range can plan for that. You can.

You also decide where the money goes. Valley Produce Company pure butter shortbread at $7.95 does the same job inside a box as a $19.95 shortbread tin, and the $12 difference pays for a proper card and a metre of wide ribbon, which the recipient does notice.

The components do not have to come from a supermarket. The range we pack into our own hampers is on the site as single items. The fastest way to make a home-built hamper read as groceries is to fill it with things the recipient already buys for themselves.

Size the box before you shop. Six to eight items is the range I work in for anything being posted: enough that the container looks generous when the lid comes off, few enough that the parcel stays under the weight where freight starts to hurt. Two of those items should be things the recipient would never buy for themselves, three should be shelf-stable savoury things that get used slowly through January, and one should be sweet. Past eight items you are usually paying to send weight rather than paying to send a gift.

One practical note before you fill a trolley. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100, and the eight-item basket above lands at $87.60, so one more $12.95 tin carries it past $100 and the leg to your house stops costing anything. The leg from your house onward is the part most DIY costings forget, and it is dealt with below.

Six decisions that stop a home-built box reading as groceries

This is the part of the job I actually do. The distance between a hamper and a bag of shopping is twenty minutes and six decisions.

1. Use something with sides. A shallow wooden crate, a lidded storage box, a picnic basket, or a sturdy lined carton. Flat trays fail, because height is what makes a box read as full.
2. Build a false floor. Crumpled paper or shred underneath, pressed down firm, so the top layer sits proud of the rim. A container filled only to half its depth looks half empty even when nothing is missing.
3. Tallest at the back, labels facing forward. Everything should be legible in one glance from the front. If the recipient has to lift something out to work out what it is, the arrangement has failed.
4. Vary the heights and the shapes. Six items in three different heights looks composed. Six identical tins looks like stock. A tube, a jar and a flat box beside each other do most of that work.
5. Fragile things ride on top. Crackers and biscuits go in last, never under a bottle or a jar of oil. A cracker that has spent three days under something heavy arrives as crumbs.
6. Wrap the whole thing once. One sheet of cellophane, gathered and tied with a single wide ribbon, beats six small bows every time. Then write the card by hand. It is the one part of a home-made hamper that cannot be bought.

Sending it, which is where DIY gets expensive

A bought hamper travels once, from our bench to the person opening it. A home-built one travels twice: the components come to you, then the finished box goes on. That second leg is what turns a close comparison into a clear one, and it gets worse the further the box goes and the more it weighs. Australia Post publishes its rates by size and weight, so price your finished parcel before you commit to the idea rather than after.

Three things worth doing differently once the box is built.

Repack it for transit. Do not post the presentation container bare. Put it inside a plain mailing carton with paper braced around it so nothing shifts. A hamper that lands with the ribbon crushed and the contents rearranged undoes the twenty minutes you spent on it.

Respect the heat. An Australian December is not kind to chocolate sitting in a van or a depot. If the box is going a long way, weight it towards biscuits, crackers, nuts and preserves, and keep the chocolate for boxes travelling short distances or arriving early. Our guide to what to put in a Christmas hamper goes item by item on what survives the trip.

Send earlier than feels necessary. Australia Post confirms its Christmas cutoff dates in October, and the practical limit always sits earlier than the published one because the network is at its heaviest in the same fortnight. Treat mid-December as your own deadline and you will not spend Christmas Eve refreshing a tracking page. There is more on this in our guide to sending a Christmas hamper interstate.

Common questions

Is it cheaper to make your own Christmas hamper?

Usually not. The eight items in our $79.95 Foodies Hamper cost $87.60 bought as singles, and that is before a container, filler, ribbon, a card and two lots of freight. Smaller boxes come closer to line ball, but they rarely finish ahead once the packaging is counted. Make your own for the person, not for the price.

How do you make a gift hamper look professional?

Height and order. Use a container with sides, build a firm base of crumpled paper or shred so the contents sit proud of the rim, put the tallest items at the back with every label facing forward, and vary the shapes so the row does not look like a shelf. Then wrap the whole box once in cellophane with a single wide ribbon rather than tying each item separately.

What can I use as a hamper basket?

A shallow wooden crate, a lidded storage box, a picnic basket, an enamel tray with a lip, or a sturdy carton lined with tissue and brown paper. We sell the food rather than empty baskets, so this part comes from a homewares shop, a nursery or an op shop. Choose depth over width, because a deep container is far easier to make look full.

How do you post a homemade hamper?

Pack the presentation container inside a plain mailing carton, brace it with crumpled paper until nothing moves when you shake it, and tape the seams properly. Keep fragile and heat-sensitive items out of a long summer transit. Weigh and measure the finished parcel before you leave the house, because postage on a heavy interstate box is usually the number that decides whether DIY was worth it.

How far in advance can you make a Christmas hamper?

As early as you like, provided you keep the contents shelf stable. Crackers, biscuits, nuts, preserves, oils and boiled lollies all hold for months, so a box built in the first week of November is no worse in late December than one built on the 20th. Nothing fresh, nothing chilled, nothing with a fortnight of life left in it. Building early is also the only dependable way to get ahead of the December freight crush.

Or let someone else do the packing

Every hamper we send is hand-packed in Corio, Victoria, and orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day. Our full hamper range starts at $59.95, and the seasonal boxes sit together in Christmas hampers. If you are still weighing it up, our Christmas hamper ideas guide covers what earns a place in a box and what gets left in the cupboard until Easter, which is useful whichever way you end up going.