The Five Golden Rules for Effective Food Product Labelling

So you’ve created the world’s most wonderful food product and now all that’s left to do it get it off the shelves and allow word of mouth to spread – a job that’s of course much easier said than done. In a literal sense there’s no such thing as a food product that jumps off the shelves and sells itself, which is precisely what makes effective labelling so important.

In a very real sense your food label is your entire frontline marketing strategy all wrapped up and condensed on a tiny piece of paper or plastic. Get it right and your label will ensure your product flies off the shelves like the proverbial hot cakes, but get it wrong and you’ll be lucky to get a second glance.

And with this in mind, what follows is an overview of the five most important rules of all when it comes to designing and producing genuinely effective food product labels:

1 – Know Your Target Market

First and foremost, it’s crucial to know what it is your target audience is looking for. After all, if you don’t know what they want, how can you give it to them? A couple of examples might include an exotic Indian flavoured snack mix for example – what reaches out to this target audience may include warm and bright colours, exotic landscapes and the use of Asian-style fonts here and there. Produce 100% organic products on the other had and you immediately should be thinking of more greens, neutral tones and generally natural-looking packaging.

To appeal to your audience’s triggers represents the key to successful label making, so be sure to think carefully about what drives them.

2 – Evaluate Rival Brands

Standing out from the crowd is difficult – so too is coming up with a labelling idea that isn’t in any way ripping off a rival. The reason being that no matter what you’re selling, chances are there’ll already be loads of others doing the same. As such, it’s not enough to just come up with a winning idea off the top of your head – you must instead carry out in-depth research to make sure you’re not stepping on anyone else’s toes. And at the same time, you might find a little much-needed inspiration.

3 – Don’t Cover the Product

These days, buyers are about as convinced by pictures of food as they are by door-to-door window salesmen…which is suffice to say, not very. The general consensus is that if the food is good enough to buy, it should be good enough to put on show for all to see. As such, one of the cardinal rules of successful food label making is that of not covering up the entire packaging with a giant label, or leaving about 2mm of token space through which little to nothing can be seen. The simple fact of the matter is that if they can’t see inside, they might not bother taking the risk of finding out what’s in there.

Think of the best organic farm shops that tend to rake in a fortune from gourmets – more often than not the packaging used is about 90% transparent with only about 10% covered up by the label.

4 – Use a Quality Printing Service

Categorically, the worst thing you can do is to come up with a world-class idea for a label only to then have it printed by a third-rate company that’s known for putting out pure garbage. The only thing that’s worse than a seriously badly designed label is a label that looks as if it has been printed with no thought or care at all. From faded ink to blurred text to poor alignment to colours mixing with each other and so on and so forth, the moment it looks like your label was and is a poor DIY job you’ll lose the would-be buyer’s interest.

If it’s worth spending the time to design, it’s worth spending a little extra on for high-end printing services.

5 – Remember After-Sale Info

And finally, don’t forget that along with the information needed on the label to make the hard sell, you should also have your selected digital label manufacturers add some extra details on your labels for further reading once your customers take the product home. If, for example, they decide that you’ve made the best jam they’ve ever tasted, they’re going to want to know more about you. They’ll be interested in who you are, where you’re based and what else you sell –maybe even the shops that stock your brands.

Of course, you might not be able to fit anywhere near all of this on the label, but you can certainly point them in the direction of your website, your flagship store or anywhere further reading may be available.