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Tips For Making Labels For Your Small Food Company

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If you sell a line of foods at your local farmer's market or in a few grocery stores, then you'll need a way to make professional labels. Labels that look amateurish can hurt the sale of your products. When your operation is small, making the labels yourself is more cost-effective. If your food is accepted by a national chain store, then having labels printed by a commercial printing service makes more sense. Whichever way you go, the labels will look their best if they're made with a thermal transfer printer. Here are a few tips for creating your food labels.

Use Eye-Catching Colors When Possible

Color printing is more expensive, so you'll want to use monochrome for the bulk of your printing. The back labels or food ingredient labels can be printed in black ink to save money. However, the front label should be printed in a combination of bold colors so your product draws attention when it is on the shelf or in a booth at the market. You can create your labels with software and have the image transferred to a thermal printer or you may want to hire a designer so the label is professionally created from a marketing standpoint.

If you plan to buy a thermal transfer printer yourself then you may want to buy two of them. It doesn't save much money if you print in monochrome on a color printer. Since desktop thermal transfer printers aren't too expensive, it could be a better financial decision to buy one printer for monochrome printing and one for color. This will speed your production also.

Use A High-Quality Printer

Food labels should be attractive, but they also need to inform the buyer about what is inside the package or bottle. You have a lot of information to convey in a small space so using a high-quality thermal transfer printer is important. These printers create crisp text that is easy to read even with a small font size. One advantage of this printing method is that the color doesn't fade. Your product may be stored in a freezer, hot pantry, or humid refrigerator. The print shouldn't fade or bleed under these adverse conditions. Thermal transfer printing is a process that heats the ribbon so the color melts onto the paper. This creates a more durable and longer-lasting label than you could get with a traditional office printer.

Consider Additional Equipment

Printing your labels is only half of the job of getting your packaging ready. The labels must also be applied to your products. You can buy additional equipment for this if you spend a lot of time applying the labels by hand. You can buy a thermal transfer printer that prints out labels on a roll, which is usually more convenient than having them printed on sheets. When the labels are on a roll, the roll can be transferred to different machines such as a machine that rewinds the roll for easier application and a machine that applies the labels to the fronts and backs of containers such as cans and bottles. All these devices are small and can be operated on a table or desk to speed up the application of your product labels.


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