Consumer label (packaging label)
All plans
Set up the legal label of the prepacked product: elements, highlighted allergens, traces, lot and best-before date, and how to print it on your printer.
What it is for
The consumer label (or packaging label) is the one on the product you sell prepacked: name of the food, ingredients with allergens highlighted, traces, nutrition information, net quantity, lot, best-before date and your company details. It is the label an inspector looks at and the one an allergic customer reads.
Recipok builds it from the recipe data, so you do not have to rewrite anything: if you change an ingredient, the label changes. You set up once which elements appear and how, and then you print it from the production order with the real lot. It is used by the bakery, whoever does the packing and whoever is in charge of quality.
Before you start
- A complete recipe, with allergens, traces and nutrition information checked.
- On the ingredients, the Generic component (the legal name that must appear in the list) and Hide on label for containers and accessories. See Ingredient allergens and nutrition information.
- Logo, company name, address and health registration number in Configuration › General Data. Traces that affect all your production go in Configuration › Master data (Traces in every recipe).
- The shelf-life days in Recipe data and, if you sell in several sizes, the sales formats with their weight and barcode.
Setting up the recipe label
Open the recipe and go to Label configuration in the Recipe options menu. At the top, under Labeling type, leave General labeling (the other option is the internal label). Changes are saved automatically. The configuration is split into tabs:
| Tab | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Template | Apply a saved template, save the current one as new or update it. |
| General settings | Label width (mm) and Block separation (px). They affect all the labels this recipe generates. |
| Barcode | Which code to print and whether it carries the date and lot. See Barcodes. |
| Label elements | The blocks of the label: they can be shown or hidden, reordered by dragging, and each has its own font, size and alignment. |
| Preview | Preview, Print draft and Print link. |
The label elements
- Logo (with its size and position) and Product name: if you leave it blank, the recipe name is used.
- Ingredients: the list in order of weight, with Allergens in bold or Allergens in uppercase, Hide percentages and the Percentages per ingredient (QUID) list to declare only the percentage of the ingredient highlighted in the name. Company traces are added automatically; Do not add the company traces removes them for this recipe. You can Edit content by hand and use Restore data to go back to the calculation.
- Nutritional information: as a table or with Show as paragraph.
- Manufacturing date, Best before (with its wording, for example “Best before” or “Use by”, and the Expiration days), Lot n° (with its Prefix) and Freeze date.
- Final weight (the net quantity), Company data, Free text 1 and 2 (for example “Store between 0 and 4 °C”), Additional information, Add image, Barcode and QR Code.
- 1Allergens highlighted: in bold or uppercase, also inside semi-finished products. Traces are added at the end.
- 2Lot and best-before date: from the recipe they are a draft; the real ones come from the production order.
Printing the label
Test the design from the recipe
In the Preview tab click Print draft, or use the Print › Consumer label menu in the top bar. If the recipe has sales formats, you choose the Format (the net quantity and the barcode come from it) and the template.
Print the real label from the order
When you finish a production order, in Label printing click Manage labels and choose Label to customer. It comes out with the real lot, manufacturing date and best-before date, one per item or all at once (Print all).
Set up the printer
The label opens in a new browser tab. Press Ctrl+P, choose your printer, the size of your label or roll, zero margins and 100% scale.
Print link gives you an address to print drafts without logging in to Recipok, for example from the computer in the packing area.
The label that counts for traceability is the one printed from the production order: it links the prepacked product to the lots of its ingredients. Do not stick draft labels on the product.
Printers
- Any printer installed on the device will do: thermal roll printers (the most common in bakeries, with continuous 62 or 102 mm rolls), adhesive sheet printers or office printers. The printer must have its driver installed and the label size configured.
- With a continuous roll, set the Label width (mm) to the width of the roll; the length grows with the content.
- If you always print on fixed-size labels (60 × 40, A4 sheet of 24…) and need everything to fit in that space, the Label designer builds the label on the real size.
Tips
Print a real label of each product on the bakery printer and keep it as an approved sample. When something “comes out cut off”, compare it: it is almost always the paper or the printer, not the content.
- Check the ingredients list on a product with a base or filling: semi-finished products are broken down in proportion to their weight.
- The ingredients block settings are shared with the technical sheet.
- For the legal context of allergens (prepacked, loose, menu), read Allergen labelling.