Applications, Colour and branding, Labels, Printers

If you’re involved in catering, prepared meals, food production or food service operations, you’re certainly using aluminum trays, paper trays, CPET plastic trays with clam shells or seals to deliver lunch boxes, salads, fresh meals, frozen meals, sandwiches, deserts and soups.

In many situations, a good marker and nice handwriting does the job to identify the content of the tray. Sometimes a clear clamshell says it all.

It may make sense to identify the packaging manually if only a few units are produced. After a certain quantity however, you will consider using labels because of the time required to write on all the items. It also keeps things legible and helps you avoid misspelling or missing a detail.

A feast for the eyes!

What food preparation small businesses often overlook is the branding aspect of their packaging. They put efforts in producing visually interesting food but often provide bland packaging including labels with black and white nutritional facts, ingredients and descriptions of the food.

Why such low expectations? Today’s technology offers onsite full colour on demand inkjet label production for equal if not lower price than Avery labels. Using a basic computer laptop, appropriate software and a bit of assistance, you can produce high quality paper or synthetic labels of all shapes and sizes to put on your trays, clams and more. There isn’t that much to it when you think about it.

Add wow to your labels

Besides using great graphics to attract and to help empower your brand, you can even go a step further as variable information printing allows you to generate personalized labels throughout your label run. For example, having a greeting message for each participant for a business meeting including his or her name and a description of their chosen meal.

Go retail

Finally, when you produce enough to go retail, your products have to stand out and be strongly branded. When people bring home your delicious food, your “advertising” comes with it, reminding them and showing guests where this great food comes from.

In a retail situation, law requires allergy prevention information and ingredients lists. At that point, Avery labels have their limits and will cost you…

So, don’t settle for black and white, which can look cheap under many circumstances. Go for in-house high quality full colour inkjet labels.

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