After carefully sourcing super fresh milk, developing a range of tasty flavours, and finalising your distribution channels, it’s time to label your brand new ice cream. You could rush straight to selling, but your ice cream label design is vital for ensuring that consumers actually want to buy your product - they might not always have the opportunity to taste it! Keep reading to find out our top tips for designing custom ice cream labels, and discover new ideas for materials and print processes.
Pick Freezer Adhesive
Before you get to the fun part of creating your custom ice cream label design, you first need to select a material and adhesive. We recommend semi-gloss with a freezer adhesive as this is a cost effective material which is designed for deep freeze applications. This adhesive even has a service temperature down to minus 40 degrees Celsius! Not only is this paper from sustainable origins, but it is fully compatible with all of our print processes, meaning you’re able to have total flexibility with your design. There’s are also other materials which can complement your packaging, such as clear polypropylene.
Think About your Container
Ice cream containers come in all different shapes and sizes, so unfortunately there’s not a ‘one size fits all’ solution. That said, there are many common placements for labels - such as in the recessed part of the container lid, or on the base. This will depend on your budget; a cost effective choice is for one label on the lid, but if you’ve got more to spend then you may wish to split different parts (such as the ingredients) onto a separate base or side label.
You may want to get a container pre-printed with a basic design, and then use stickers to customise for different flavours. This is a great option as stickers are much easier to update or change, plus can be a lot cheaper across many quantity breaks.
Save Space for important information
As with any consumer food product, you need to ensure that ingredients and allergens are suitably identified so as to meet legal requirements for your ice cream stickers. For dairy products, Milk is a key allergen, but other ingredients may also contain additional allergens. Ensure you use a legible font for allergy and ingredient information, so that even on small labels it is easy to read.
Does your ice cream have a special feature such as being vegetarian, dairy free or free from nuts? With consumers more conscious than ever of ingredients and allergens in their food, promoting this feature could help appeal to new markets.
Another legal requirement is a best before or use by date, which needs to be somewhere on the ice cream packaging and easily readable. This date could be included in your actual label design, as on the picture above, but there's also other options if you need more flexibility. For example, you could pick matt paper to be your material if you want to write on the label by hand. Alternatively, you could thermal transfer print the date onto your labels for a more professional look.
Make sure to also include your 'Product of Animal Origin' (POAO) oval symbol. This is part of EU food safety regulation to track food processing establishments, so as to help with food safety and customs inspections. Rules regarding this symbol will change depending on how the UK leaves the European Union, so make sure to subscribe to our updates for news about any changes in labelling requirements.
Differentiate Your Flavours
You’ve spent time carefully developing amazing new flavours, so make sure you’ve got amazing labels to match! Our digital label capabilities mean we can print a whole range of varieties, even incorporating variable data, so as to print customised labels for each of your flavours.
We recommend using colours or patterns (or both!) to create a mini ‘sub brand’ for each flavour. This means it’s easy for your customers to quickly find their favourite flavour, while also enticing people to try new flavours and combinations, which may otherwise have gone unnoticed without a distinct label design.
Lots of brands use a colour related to the ice cream flavour, such as red for strawberry or brown for chocolate. Our digital press can print across an extended colour gamut, meaning that your chosen colours will look vibrant and eye-catching and help stand out from competitors.
Conclusion
While designing a brand new label from scratch can feel daunting, it doesn't need to be! At Crown Labels, we've got lots of experience supporting ice cream and dairy customers to create their perfect label. From ensuring the best materials, to developing a design which makes use of our full range of production capabilities, our team are here to help - click here to get in touch.