What's Your Label Made Of?

Photo courtesy of StudioJaz

What’s Your Label Made Of?

Why Do Labels Even Matter

The life of a food label is so contradictory. It is one of the most important part to the packaging, as it usually carries ALL required informations needed in the sales of the product, plus ALL the brand goodies needed to invite the customer to the brand’s community. (Whew, no pressure!)
On the other hand, the substance of what the label actually is made up of— aside from the superficial details—is an afterthought. Direct function need over design becomes the obvious way to go. “It needs to have a sticky adhesive.” “It needs to close side A to B”. “It needs to be used as a security barrier.” “It needs to keep my product in place.” “It needs to identify my product on the shelf”. Sticky solution found! and hit order…and PRINT. (Click)

If you’re already on a sustainability path with your packaging, you’ve probably spent time researching the most optimal solution to the product you want to distribute. But what about your labeling? These days labels are made out of different materials. There are ones designed to perform differently and meant for certain conditions. Check out this summarized guide here from Elevate Packaging.

Let’s think about the fresh fruits and vegetables we buy at the supermarket and those ugly sticky residue stickers. Yuck! There has been many circumstances where the residue is left on the fruit after washing that cutting it off seems to be the only option, because…yeah, who wants to eat sticky adhesive? Imagine how many of those are cut off for convenience and then end up in the compost bin, or worse the landfill. These synthetic labels in a compost bin = Not going anywhere + potentially contaminating compost. It’s like asking a turtle to be a goat. It’s unauthentic to what a turtle is, its purpose, its preferred habitat, and its asking for an impossible task to fulfill. The sticker label is not designed to go in the compost, so why have something go into a system it’s not intended for? Doesn’t it make sense to use a compostable sticker (or no sticker) for fruit if the fruit rind is going to rot and do what nature intended it to do ? This is just touching the surface of what thoughtful design could look like when product, label and package are harmonized.

When we look at “sustainable packaging” today, it needs to be holistic. Designing today is about integration and interconnections of all parts. Designing packaging from a silo mentality removed from the product, environment and stakeholders doesn’t make good business sense. It leads to more resources used and wasted— and this means feeding a more expensive linear system of take-make-use-waste that is expensive for ALL in the short and long term.

Good news is there are options out there and people who can help! The awareness is growing and so are the superheroes here to help guide us through these unfamiliar waters. Innovating packaging and the way we look at it is already moving in a good direction. At PueoKea Farms, we’ve worked with a great identity design studio called ʻĀina (previously known as ON ANY GIVEN MONDAY) for the creation of our company identity and sustainable design strategy, especially packaging. We are a small business starting up our third year in slow steps and they have been extremely helpful in setting us up from the beginning!

For all of our labels, we are currently using Illinois-based company Elevate Packaging and their PURE Labels as we’ve found them to be a company at the forefront of shifting the packaging industry in the U.S. and ones providing great alternatives during this transition to more circular models. We have gone with a 100% recycled post consumer waste label made from tree paper as that meets our current package design, aesthetic and functional needs. As we develop our packaging strategy and system further this may change and we may opt for the other options they offer, which include tree-free paper options, and optimized recycling and compostable labels if they work better.

We are excited to see how packaging continues to develop in waste-less, circular ways and we’re along for the ride! We encourage you to take the effort and think about the way your company wishes to move forward on this topic too! To collectively moving forward. I Mua!

Writer: PueoKea Farms