You send the logo across, expecting the job to be booked. Instead the reply is a set of questions: is that a vector file, which of those two reds is the brand colour, and is anything meant to print on the inside? For most independent food businesses this is the first sign that printing packaging is not the same as printing a menu. It is a good sign, actually. The suppliers who ask nothing are the ones whose first delivery surprises you. Here is what sits behind those questions, from the production side, so your first run lands the way you pictured it.

Why brown board changes your colours

Office paper is white; kraft board is not, and that single difference explains most of the disappointment we see. The brown base shifts every colour printed on it: tones read warmer, darker and less saturated than they look on screen. A confident red drifts towards earth, a pale blue loses its lift, and pastels almost disappear. White is not an ink in standard printing, so wherever your design shows white, the board colour stays unless a special opaque white is specified. Black behaves differently too, since a flat single black looks weak and greyish on uncoated brown, which is why printers build a richer black from several inks.

None of that limits your brand; it just changes the design decision. Artwork that works with the material rather than against it looks better on kraft: clean shapes, solid areas, one or two colours. If a crisp white look is essential to your identity, coated white board is the honest answer, and that choice is really a material decision rather than a printing one.

What stays off the food-contact side

Here is the point that surprises buyers most often: printing goes on the outside. The surface touching your food normally stays unprinted, because components of printing inks can migrate into food under unfavourable conditions. Low-migration ink systems designed for inside printing do exist, but they are a deliberate technical choice with their own documentation rather than the default of a standard order. A supplier who offers inside printing without asking a single question about your product is not being helpful.

In practice, keep your artwork outside and make sure the supplier can tell you which ink system is used and that the declaration of compliance covers the finished printed item, not just the plain board. We set out what that document should contain in our guide to what food-safe packaging actually means on paper.

The file: where jobs actually get stuck

Four issues repeat in prepress. Fonts that were never embedded and get substituted on the production machine. Logos pulled from a website as small images instead of supplied as vectors from the original. Colours built for screen that have to be converted for print, shifting the tone in the process. And elements sitting too close to a cut or fold, so they look clipped once the pack is made up. None of these is dramatic when caught before printing; every one of them costs a run when caught afterwards.

Your preparation is short. Ask your designer for the open file plus a PDF with fonts embedded or converted to outlines, get the logo as a vector, and decide which brand colour is the binding one so the printer can set it properly. Fine lines and very small type deserve a little more weight on uncoated stock than they need on your menu.

A proof settles what a screen cannot

Monitors emit light; board does not. The only reliable comparison is a proof on exactly the material you are ordering: same board, same coating, same size. Hold it under your shop lighting, put the product in it, photograph it on your phone, because that is how your customers will meet it. Anyone serious about brand colour signs off on a physical proof rather than a screen. In our experience this single step prevents more complaints than any promise written into a quote.

Finishes look good and cost twice

Gloss varnish, lamination, embossing: visually they can add a lot, with two side effects. They raise the unit price, and they can reduce recyclability, since extra layers complicate fibre processing. As fee systems move towards modulation, where harder-to-recycle packaging costs more, the plainer option is increasingly the cheaper one on both lines. We worked through how that arithmetic lands in our piece on who actually pays packaging EPR. For most food businesses the honest recommendation is simple: a clean one or two-colour print on good board reads as more premium than a full gloss laminate that shows every fingerprint from the counter to the customer.

Less coverage, more effect

Full-bleed printing is rarely the strongest answer. A well-placed logo on unprinted kraft looks calmer, suits the material and costs less than flooding the surface with ink. If you print several lines, one shared element does more than five different designs: the same motif across cups, food boxes and bags reads as an identity and simplifies production, because fewer separate print setups are involved.

Print methods, in a minute

You do not need to become a printer, but two ideas save money. Part of the cost of any print job sits in the setup rather than in the individual item, which is why the price per unit falls as the run grows and why every extra design adds a fixed cost of its own. That is where well-meant plans quietly go wrong: four seasonal variants on a first order can cost more than a larger run of one good design. Digital printing usually suits smaller quantities and short lead times, while traditional methods come into their own on longer runs where the unit price keeps dropping. A supplier worth keeping will tell you which side of that line your quantity sits on, rather than selling you the method they happen to prefer.

Cutting and folding need room

Packaging is not a flyer. It gets die-cut, creased and folded, and something happens to your artwork at every one of those edges. Wording that looks centred on a flat drawing can wrap around a corner once the pack is made up, and a line placed hard against the cut line reads as uneven afterwards, because board carries small tolerances through the cutting stage. Prepress works around this with safety margins: important elements move in from edges and creases, while background areas are extended past the trim so no unprinted sliver shows after cutting. Give your designer the die-line for the actual item rather than a generic rectangle and this problem disappears before it starts.

Checklist before you approve

  • Is the artwork a vector file, with fonts embedded or converted to outlines?
  • Have you named the binding brand colour, and has it been set for this material?
  • Does the food-contact side stay unprinted, and does the compliance paperwork cover the printed item?
  • Have you seen a proof on the board you are actually ordering, not just a screen render?
  • Do you genuinely need the finish, and what does it do to price and recyclability?

One honest limit to close on. Good printing does not rescue the wrong pack. If the box is too tight for your portion or the cup cannot hold your service time, no artwork will save it; get the product right first, then the picture on it. The cheapest proof you will ever buy is the one you look at before the run, not the one you piece together from complaints afterwards.