Insulated Shipping Container Patents: Top Companies & Trends 2026
- 81.0% of all 63 records sit with just five assignees — this is a field with a narrow set of incumbents, not a fragmented one.
- Filing peaked in 2017 at 15 and has not returned to that level since; treat the most recent two years as incomplete rather than as a real decline.
- B65D and F25D dominate the claim space at 85.7% and 58.7% of records respectively, while packaging/wrapping and heat-exchange classes stay in single digits.
Filing growth compares 2021 (4 records) with 2024 (0) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 63 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
Insulated shipping container design sits at the intersection of thermal engineering and reusable packaging: containers built to hold a payload within an ambient temperature profile for a defined holding time, using vacuum insulation panels, phase-change materials or aerogel liners inside a structural shell. The 63 records in scope span filings from 2015 through the 2026 cut-off, drawn from search terms tied to holding time, vacuum insulation panels, payload volume ratio, qualification testing, and reusable versus single-use design.
The field is shaped less by chemistry than by mechanical and thermal packaging claims: how a panel is laminated into a wall, how a lid seals, and how a container is qualified to hold temperature over a stated duration. That keeps most of the activity inside containers and cooling classes rather than materials science proper.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 63 records: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing trend: a 2017 peak, not a steady climb
Filings ran at 15 in 2017, the peak year across the period, and fell over the following years; the 2021-to-2024 span shows a -100% change, from 4 down to 0. 2024 is the last year that can be read as complete — 2025 and 2026 are still filling in as publications catch up with filing dates, so do not read the tail as the field going quiet.
Technology composition: containers and cooling lead
B65D (containers and packaging) appears in 85.7% of the 63 records and F25D (refrigerators and cooling) in 58.7%, confirming that most claims are structural or thermal-management rather than materials-only. B32B (layered products and laminates) at 39.7% captures panel and wall-construction claims. Because records can carry more than one class, these shares add up to well over 100%.
Shares are the percentage of the 63 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Insulated Shipping Container Design with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about insulated shipping container design and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited prior art in this space
US20180282050A1 — Insulated shipping container for works of art
Filed by Turtle B.V. and published in 2018, this record claims an injection-moulded shipping container with an enclosing section and a cover section joined by retaining means placed on some, but not all, wall sections. The wall section left without retaining means instead carries support strips along its length, with the enclosing section's interior built from a flat rectangular wall segment and four connected wall sections.Abstract lightly condensed from the original filing text.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US5201868A | Insulated shipping container | 152 |
| 2 | US20110284556A1 | Insulated Shipping Container | 135 |
| 3 | US4682708A | Insulated shipping container | 126 |
| 4 | WO2017207974A1 | A thermally insulated container | 79 |
| 5 | US3856178A | Insulated shipping container | 51 |
| 6 | US6233965B1 | Insulated shipping container | 36 |
| 7 | US20030234255A1 | Insulated shipping container | 26 |
| 8 | US20180282049A1 | Insulated shipping containers with compound insulation having space therebetween | 25 |
| 9 | US6055825A | Insulated shipping container | 22 |
| 10 | US20160090227A1 | High efficiency bolt-on thermal insulating panel and thermally insulated shipping container employing such a … | 16 |
Citation counts inside a searched corpus favour older filings that have had more time to accumulate citations — read them as a signal of influence on later designs, not as evidence of current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three figures from this dataset carry direct implications for anyone deciding where to file or where to look for open ground.
This field rewards incumbency
Five assignees account for 81.0% of all 63 records in scope, and the top 10 combined reach 98.4%. A new entrant is filing directly against a small number of established container makers rather than into open ground.
Read the recent tail carefully
The 2021-to-2024 span moved from 4 filings to 0, a -100% change on the figures given. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, 2025 and 2026 numbers are still incomplete and should not be read as the field cooling further.
Structural and thermal claims dominate
B65D (containers) and F25D (cooling) between them cover most of the corpus, while B65B (packaging and wrapping), B23P (metal working), F16L (pipe fittings) and F28D (heat-exchange apparatus) each sit at single-digit shares — signalling where claim density is thin.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to insulated shipping container design, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the field, and what is still open
The ranked list returned by the data endpoint covers 13 companies; it is not a top-50 or top-100 list, it is everyone the search surfaced.
One assignee sets the pace
The leading assignee holds 25 of the 63 records in scope, well ahead of the field, which is consistent with a small group of specialist container and thermal-packaging makers having filed steadily since 2015 rather than a wave of new entrants.
A steep drop after the leader
Filing counts fall sharply from the leader to fifth place, and again to tenth place at 2 records, which points to a long tail of single- or few-filing entrants rather than a broad, evenly matched competitive set.
Filing here is largely solo
The strongest co-assignee pair in the dataset appears only twice, which suggests most applicants in this space file independently rather than through joint ventures or shared R&D arrangements.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| LAMINAR MEDICA | 0 | — |
| American Aerogel Corp | 0 | — |
| PELICAN BIOTHERMAL LLC | 0 | — |
| TURTLE BV | 0 | — |
| TUSCARORA INC | 0 | — |
| GENERAL BOX CO | 0 | — |
| Softbox Systems Ltd | 0 | — |
| WILLIAMS ALTON | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a concentrated field with thin activity in a handful of adjacent classes. The next step is usually to test a specific claim idea against the prior art directly.
Check freedom-to-operate on a specific design
Run a candidate claim against the most-cited records in this set before committing engineering time to a container design.
Explore in Patsnap EurekaTrack the leading assignees' recent filings
Follow the leader and next-ranked assignees for new publications as 2025–2026 data continues to fill in.
Set up monitoring in Patsnap EurekaScope the under-claimed branches
Investigate vacuum insulation panel sealing and reusable-cycle qualification testing as possible filing angles with less prior art density.
Search white space in Patsnap EurekaCommon questions about this landscape
The ranked list for this dataset covers 13 companies, with the leading assignee holding 25 of the 63 records in scope — far ahead of the rest of the field. The top 5 combined account for 81.0% of all records, and the top 10 reach 98.4%, so most of the activity sits with a small number of specialist container and thermal-packaging firms rather than being spread evenly. Anyone entering this space should expect to file close to these established players rather than into empty ground.
Filing peaked in 2017 at 15 records and declined afterward, with the 2021-to-2024 span showing a -100% change, from 4 filings down to 0. However, publication of a patent application typically lags its filing date by roughly 18 months, so the 2025 and 2026 figures in this dataset are still incomplete. It is not accurate to describe the field as currently in decline based on the most recent one or two years alone.
Most records fall under B65D, containers and packaging, which appears in 85.7% of the 63 records in scope, and F25D, refrigerators and cooling, at 58.7%. B32B, layered products and laminates, covers panel and wall-construction claims at 39.7%. Because a single record can carry more than one classification code, these shares add up to well over 100%, and they show that claims are concentrated in structural and thermal-management territory rather than in materials chemistry alone.
Classes tied to packaging and wrapping (B65B), metal-working hardware (B23P), pipe fittings (F16L) and heat-exchange apparatus (F28D) each sit at only 3.2% to 9.5% of the 63 records, well below the dominant container and cooling classes. That gap suggests under-claimed ground in areas like vacuum insulation panel edge sealing, reusable-cycle qualification testing, and phase-change heat-exchange integration, where filing density is thin relative to the core claim space.
It is highly concentrated: five assignees hold 81.0% of all 63 records in scope, and ten assignees hold 98.4%. The drop from the leading assignee's 25 records to the fifth-ranked assignee's 3 is steep, and it falls further to 2 records by tenth place. Co-assignee filing is rare too — the strongest joint-filing pair in the dataset appears only twice — which points to a field of largely independent filers rather than joint ventures or shared research programmes.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.