From the time the product is manufactured until it is carried and ultimately used, the product is subjected to some form of handling and transportations. During this process, the product can be subjected to many potential hazards. One of them is the damage caused by shocks. In order to design a product-package system to protect the product, the peak acceleration or G force to the product that causes damage needs to be determined. When a corrugated fiberboard box loaded with products is dropped onto the ground, part of the energy acquired due to the action of the gravitational acceleration during the free fall is dissipated in the product and the package in various ways. The shock absorbing characteristics of the packaging cushion materials are presented as a family of cushion curves in which curves showing peak accelerations during impacts for a range of static loads are shown for several drop heights. The new method for determining the shock absorbing characteristics of cushioning materials for protective packaging has been described and demonstrated. It has been shown that cushion curves can be produced by combining the static compression and impact characteristics of the material. The dynamic factor was determined by the iterative least mean squares (ILMS) optimization technique in which the discrepancies between peak acceleration data predicted from the theoretical model and obtained from the impact tests are minimized. The approach enabled an efficient determination of cushion curves from a small number of experimental impact data.