How to Send 200 Christmas Hampers to 200 Addresses

By Arthur Hodgson, Hamper Packing Manager at The Gourmet Pantry.

Send us the spreadsheet. One order reaches every name on it. Each recipient gets their own hamper, their own gift message and their own tracking number, and your accounts team gets one invoice for the lot. The bulk order form is an Excel file with one row per recipient, and it is how 200 hampers reach 200 addresses.

I run the packing room. Hampers have been hand-packed here in Geelong since 2019, and a 200-line order does not look like chaos from where I stand. It looks like 200 single gifts, packed one at a time, each with the right card under the bow. The everyday corporate order here is one hamper, one recipient, one address. Two hundred of them is the same job, done two hundred times. The spreadsheet exists so nobody has to type it out two hundred times.

What follows is the form itself, column by column, and what happens once you send it back. The wider picture, including the ordering routes and the tax side, sits in our corporate Christmas hampers guide. This piece is the mechanics.

One spreadsheet, one order, one invoice

Download the form from the corporate gifting service and email it back to your account manager, who comes back with a quote, usually within one business day. Under five hampers you do not need it: order online and use the ship-to-multiple-addresses option at checkout. From five up, the sheet is faster than anything else, and it stays faster all the way to a thousand.

However long the list, it becomes a single order and a single batch invoice. Accounts payable handles one document rather than 200, and regular orderers can ask about a credit account so gifting runs through the normal payment cycle. Every hamper over $100 ships free, and that includes hampers shipped individually to their own address, which is the part people expect to be charged for.

The four decisions you make once, at the top of the sheet

These sit above the recipient grid and apply to the whole order. They take a minute and save the back and forth later.

1. Your logo on the gift cards. Yes or no. It prints in full colour at no extra cost, on the card that sits under the bow of every hamper. On a list of 200, it is the one piece of branding every recipient definitely sees.
2. The gift card design. A dropdown of the printed designs. General Occasion and Happy Birthday are free; the premium designs, Happy Christmas and Thank You among them, carry a $5 surcharge shown against each name. A separate question covers fully custom cards: already arranged, not this time, or tell me more.
3. Your preferred dispatch week. The quiet one. This single field is how a dispatch hold is actioned. Nominate the week you want hampers landing and the order waits for it, which is how a September brief becomes a December dispatch without anyone having to remember to call.
4. Authority to leave. Yes means Australia Post can leave the parcel in a safe place, and if there is no safe place it goes to the recipient's local post office. No means the recipient collects from the post office whenever they are out. On a list of home addresses, this toggle decides how many of your gifts get opened in December rather than January.

The recipient grid, column by column

One row per recipient, and every row is a complete instruction. Here is what each column wants and where people come unstuck.

The 40-character caps catch people out most often, and they are worth knowing before you ask 200 colleagues for addresses rather than after. Name, company and both address lines each stop at 40, and anything longer gets shortened somewhere. Better by you than by us.

The gift message is three fields, not one

To, Message and From are three separate columns, which means every hamper carries its own card, printed and tucked under the bow. Copy one message down the whole column and vary only the To line, and it still reads as though somebody wrote it, because the recipient sees their own name first.

The card is the first thing anyone reads. It gets picked up before the lid comes off, and it is what stays on a desk through January. Give the message line a reason and a year rather than a greeting. "Thank you for a big year on the Southbank project, from all of us at" beats "Season's Greetings" for the same number of characters and the same cost, which is none.

Before you send it back

Two instructions sit on the form itself. The first asks you to confirm the delivery addresses before submitting. The second asks you not to change the format of the spreadsheet. Adding a column, merging cells or resorting the sheet makes it stop lining up when we read it, and a sheet rebuilt by hand is a sheet with a new chance of error in it.

Addresses are the one thing we cannot fix downstream. Once an order is placed the parcels start moving, and correcting an address after dispatch means chasing a parcel rather than editing a cell. So treat the list, not the hampers, as the slow part of the job, and keep your own copy: next year's order starts as this year's file with the leavers deleted.

Addresses that need a decision, not just a cell

Offices that shut down. A hamper that arrives the day after the office closes sits in a dark reception until mid-January. Either nominate a dispatch week that lands before the shutdown, or send to home addresses.

Hospitals. We recommend against hospital delivery. Wards move patients and parcels do not follow them. Send to a home address, or to a family member who will get it to the right person.

Home addresses with nobody home. The authority to leave decision again. Staff lists going to homes during business hours are the classic case: without it, a good number of your gifts become post office collection slips.

Mixed lists. Half office, half home, some interstate, is normal and does not need two sheets. One list, one order, one invoice.

What happens after the sheet lands with us

Your account manager reads the list, confirms the hampers and quotes it, usually within one business day. Approve it and it is one order.

• Packing. Every hamper is hand-packed here, one at a time, with its own card. Supply branded items or brochures and we pack them into each hamper at no extra cost.
• Dispatch and tracking. Standard orders paid before 12pm on a weekday are packed and dispatched the same business day, and every parcel is tracked with Australia Post. Large bulk orders and peak periods, Christmas included, can take up to 48 hours.
• Consolidated shipments. Not every list is 200 doors. Pallets to head office and cartons to each state branch are both normal, with freight quoted on the order.

December is the busiest month on the bench and on the postal network, and we publish no Christmas cutoff dates until Australia Post confirms theirs. The advice is the same every year: the earlier the sheet lands, the more control you have over the week it goes out.

Choosing what goes in 200 boxes

The hamper column is set per row, so a long list can be tiered on a single sheet: a heavier gift for the people you most want to keep, a well-chosen one for the wider book, one invoice covering both. Hampers for clients and hampers for staff are usually the two tiers.

• Gourmet Bites Hamper, under $60. The workhorse for a long staff list, and alcohol-free, so it suits everyone.
• Gourmet Snack Box Hamper, under $100. For a mixed list where you do not know the household: savoury and sweet, nothing needing a corkscrew.
• Mumm Sparkling & Gourmet Finest Hamper, under $150. What businesses reach for when the recipient matters. G.H. Mumm with the gourmet range, and the one most likely to get mentioned back to you.

On a list of 200 you cannot know everyone's position on alcohol, so alcohol-free hampers are a workplace staple rather than a fallback. The full Christmas hampers range suits gifts going to homes, and Christmas hampers for business narrows it to what businesses order.

Questions we get asked about long lists

How do I send hampers to lots of different addresses?

Put every recipient on their own row of the bulk order form, with their address and gift message, and send it to your account manager. It becomes one order, and each hamper is dispatched to its own door with its own card and tracking. Under five hampers, use the ship-to-multiple-addresses option at checkout.

Is there a spreadsheet for bulk hamper orders?

Yes. It is an Excel file you download from the corporate page: a sender block, four order-level choices, then one row per recipient. Fill it in, email it back, and your account manager quotes it, usually within one business day.

Will each hamper have its own gift message?

Yes. The gift message is three separate columns, a To line, a Message line and a From line, filled in row by row. Every hamper carries its own printed card under the bow, and your logo prints on those cards in full colour at no extra cost if you tick the box at the top.

What happens if a recipient is not home?

That depends on the authority to leave setting for the order. With it on, Australia Post leaves the parcel in a safe place, and if there is no safe place it goes to the recipient's local post office. With it off, the recipient collects from the post office. For home delivery lists, most businesses turn it on.

Send us the list

Email the corporate gifting team at corporate@thegourmetpantry.com.au or call 1300 936 406, 9am to 5pm AEST Monday to Friday, and your account manager will come back with the form and a quote. The list does not have to be final: a rough count, a budget and a preferred week is enough to start, and the addresses can follow.