Five questions, and the material chooses itself

Question 1

Does it meet water — and how?

This one question eliminates half the catalogue, so it comes first. But « waterproof » is three different problems and the answers are not interchangeable:

• Condensation — a bottle out of a fridge, a jar in a cellar. A coated paper survives it if it is laminated; an uncoated creative paper does not.
• Splashing and wiping — a bathroom, a kitchen, a workshop bench. Here you change material: white polypropylene from £168, or polyethylene for a pack that flexes.
• Immersion or wash-down — an ice bucket, a returnable bottle, a hosed floor. Polypropylene or polyester, and an adhesive chosen for wet application. A wet-strength paper at £157 keeps a paper look through an ice bucket, which is why wine and beer use it.

⚠️ The trap: a lamination does not waterproof a label. It protects the printed face; the edges and the paper behind still drink. If the label is genuinely wet, change the material, not the finish.

Question 3

Does the label touch the food itself?

Not « is it a food product » — does the adhesive side touch what will be eaten. The two cases are priced very differently and confusing them is the most expensive mistake on this page.

On the packaging — a jar, a pot, a wrapped bar, a carton. Any material works and you start at £117 per 100 on coated paper. This is the vast majority of food labels.

On the food — a label stuck to a cheese rind, a fruit, an unwrapped bakery item. That needs a certified food-contact stock supplied with its documentation: food-contact white polyester at £223 per 100. It is the only range we sell that comes with paperwork.

In between sits the greaseproof family — greaseproof Tintoretto at £170 — for anything oily enough to bleed through an ordinary paper, from cheese to soap.

Question 5

Who prints it — us, you, or both?

The answer changes the price by a factor of four, and most people never ask it.

We print everything — from £117 per 100. The label leaves finished, data included if you send us a list.

You print everything — blank rolls from £38 per 100, every stock, from ordinary coated paper to cryogenic and VOID films. The comparison chart lines all of them up in one table. Right when the content changes constantly and nobody needs colour. Your printer becomes the limit: a film needs a ribbon, a thermal paper needs none.

Both — overprintable rolls from £157: we print the design in full colour and leave a panel bare for the date and the lot you add as you pack. The middle road for anyone whose in-house printer is monochrome.

The constraint people discover last

The maximum size depends on the material — from 95 mm to 350 mm

There is no single « maximum label size » on this site, and assuming one is how artwork gets redrawn. Each family has its own ceiling, and they differ by a factor of three:

• Security films stop at 95 × 105 mm — the smallest ceiling we have.
• Coated papers, eco, metallic and industrial stop at 100 × 105 mm. An A6 label at 105 × 148 mm does not exist in paper.
• Creative papers reach 150 × 105 mm.
• Synthetics reach 150 × 220 mm — which is where A5 becomes possible.
• Clear polyester and PVC reach 300 × 350 mm, the largest die we cut.
• Blank rolls stop at 100 × 70 mm, whatever the stock.

The smallest is 15 × 10 mm, on the 3D doming range, and 15 × 20 mm on the industrial films. If your design is bigger than your family allows, the honest options are to change material or to go to stickers, which run to A3 — or, for a shop window, to window graphics, sold by the piece and produced well beyond any of these figures.