Getting the label right the first time

The label is where a lot of first-time money is lost, and almost never because somebody did not know what had to be on it. The checklist is short and public. What goes wrong is sequencing.

Order of operations

Labels get designed early because it is the enjoyable part, and ordered before the things that decide their content are settled. Three of those things are not yours to choose.

The bottle comes before the label. Panel width, curvature and the label area a supplier publishes are what a printer needs, and they change with the size.

The filing comes before the bottle. A process filing is per product, per process and per container size, so the size you can actually sell is settled by what you filed, not by what looked right.

The formula comes before the ingredient statement. Descending order by weight means a recipe tweak that moves two ingredients past each other is a new label.

So the order is formula, then process, then container, then artwork, then quantity. Producers who print at the third step reprint at the fifth.

What forces a reprint

An ingredient added, removed or reordered by weight.

A change of bottle size, which changes the net quantity statement and usually the label dimensions.

A move to or from a copacker, because the responsible firm on the label may change.

A nutrient content claim added to the front, which brings a nutrition panel with it.

An address change. It is the most ordinary one and it catches people who moved and had two thousand labels in a drawer.

Which is the argument for ordering in quantities you will use in a few months rather than in the quantity that gets the best unit price. The saving on a five-thousand run is real and it is smaller than one reformulation.

Whose name goes on it

The label carries the name and address of the manufacturer, packer or distributor. If somebody else makes your sauce, that does not move to them by default, and "Distributed by" versus "Manufactured by" is a statement about who did what.

Settle it in the copacking agreement before artwork, not after. It is a one-line decision that is expensive to revisit once printed.

The state layer sits on top

Federal requirements are the floor. A cottage food or home processor exemption, where it applies, usually requires its own wording, sometimes in a specified minimum size, in addition to everything federal.

And most states do not extend those exemptions to acidified foods at all, which is the more common finding for this category. The state page is where to check before you draw anything.

Proofing it

Read the printed proof against the tool, not against the previous artwork. Comparing to the last version reproduces last version's mistakes.

Check the net quantity position on the actual bottle rather than on the flat artwork, because a curved panel moves where the bottom thirty percent visually is.

And have somebody who did not write it read it. An ingredient left out of the statement is invisible to the person who knows what is in the pot.

References