Lightning Labels Blog

Keeping up with food labeling requirements and the most effective packaging design trends is important for anyone that sells food products or designs labels for them. Browsing our Food Labels Archive is a good place to start if you are trying to get up to speed on food labeling.

Increasingly health-conscious consumers have spurred a revolution in product labeling, but who decides what terms like “low fat” and “natural” mean on food product labels? The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration regulate the use of some terms, but not others.

Food giant General Mills is facing a lawsuit from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non-profit private watchdog group, over the company’s claims that their processed fruit snacks are healthy foods. While specific phrases on the packages are accurate — the snacks are indeed low in calories, fortified with vitamin C and gluten-free — the CSPI contends that these statements don’t accurately reflect the nature of the pre-packaged snacks. Compared to a piece of fruit with its low sugar, high fiber and rich supply of vitamins, processed fruit sheets fall short, the group claims.

General Mills may be disguising the less healthy aspects of their fruit snacks behind prominent displays of their virtues, but they aren’t making things up. Yet this kind of fudging may become a thing of the past as food product labels come under closer FDA scrutiny. While all fats were once lumped together on the label, the administration now requires manufacturers to break those fat grams into percentages of total fat, trans fat and saturated fat. Any fat labeled “partially hydrogenated” is a trans fat, a processed oil that underwent chemical alteration to turn it into a shelf-stable, solid fat. A similar push is underway to separate total sugar content into high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose and other sugars.… Read the rest of Healthy Food Product Labels: How Healthy Are Their Claims?

This entry was posted December 13th, 2011 by Jessica Wiener in Food Labels | No Comments »

LL Gets CCC to Open Up About Chocolate Crisis Condition,
Fails to Obtain Dr. Hottie’s Number

This month’s Customer Spotlight is on the Denver-based chocolate purveyor Chocolate Crisis Center (CCC). Lightning Labels conducted the following interview with Will M. Bellish, Top Flack of the CCC’s Public Relations Department.

What is the “Chocolate Crisis Condition”?
The condition manifests itself as a tendency for sufferers to employ chocolate as a way of coping with intense nonspecific cravings, unfocused mental meanderings, bizarre interactions with coworkers and family, fantasies of torturing superiors, and the stress of expensive and pointless psychotherapy sessions. Chocolate has been shown to have immediate positive effects on the Prefrontal Choco-Cortex, Cacao Nibulum, Left Cerebral Chocosphere, Reptilian Craving Complex and other areas of the brain related to ecstatic enjoyment and immediate gratification. Research continues at the Center to find new treatments for sufferers.

What types of treatments does the CCC offer its patients?
Dr. Ernst Angst, the discoverer of the condition and founder of the Chocolate Crisis Center, learned that he could achieve the same or better results for most of his patients by administering quality Belgian chocolate at the beginning of therapy sessions, then ending the session immediately so everyone had another 55 minutes to do something constructive. He has since developed a full line of chocolate bars, truffles, caramels, fruits and nuts that can achieve the same results in under a minute. Needless to say, session work has dropped off considerably.… Read the rest of Chocolate Crisis Center Relieves Suffering Caused by Widespread Condition

This entry was posted December 1st, 2011 by Christy Correll in Customer Focus, Food Labels | No Comments »

Today, we know what’s in a particular food by reading the ingredient panel and nutrition label on the box. Yet, as little as one 100 years ago, food ingredient lists had no such transparency. Milk adulterated with chalk, bread with sawdust sweepings and sausages with things even Upton Sinclair didn’t like to discuss were common at the turn of the last century. The history of food labeling is the history of consumers becoming more informed about their purchases.

Despite today’s hypersensitivity to food and its effect on our well-being, health concerns did not spark the first call for food labeling. Abraham Lincoln created the forerunner of the Food and Drug Administration in 1862, the Bureau of Chemistry, to target and regulate peddlers of nostrums and snake oils— food purity and nutrition were not a major concern of the time. Even when the first Committee on Food Standards convened in 1898, health was less a concern than cost; substituting cheap turmeric for saffron caused more consternation than cleanliness during processing.

It was not until Upton Sinclair’s published his expose of the meat-packing industry 1906, that the American public would no longer remain complacent about its food supply. Sinclair originally penned The Jungle as an indictment of unchecked capitalism, but the message its readers took was that the food they ate contained horrors. The novel spurred an act of Congress — the Food and Drugs Act of 1906 — and the first federal meat inspection program. In 1924, the Supreme Court expanded the Food and Drugs Act to condemnation of misleading product labels as well as adulteration of the products themselves.… Read the rest of A Brief History of Food Labeling Regulations

This entry was posted November 7th, 2011 by Jessica Wiener in Food Labels | No Comments »

PepsiCo, Coca-Cola Bottling, and even RC Cola International spend the equivalent of the GDP of a medium-sized country convincing you to buy their sweetened, fizzy drinks. Pepsi’s investment in Mountain Dew, which they first purchased from a pair of regional bottlers and drink-makers in 1964, has been nothing short of exorbitant. They’ve spent billions to position the caffeine-laden, citrusy drink as the “extreme” soft drink, and they’ve done it well. Mountain Dew’s partnerships with video games, alternative sports, fast food outlets, and other PepsiCo products, have led to its accounting for 80% of the citrus-flavored soft drink sales in the… Read the rest of The Wild Landscape of Private Label Soft Drinks

This entry was posted October 17th, 2011 by Jessica Wiener in Food Labels, Packaging Design | No Comments »

For manufacturers hoping to avoid complaints and confusion over food product labels, a recent contest for ideas on how to improve such labels could serve as inspiration. The contest was sponsored by GOOD magazine, the Art Center College of Design’s Designmatters, and Berkeley School of Journalism’s station News 21.

1. Replace serving size with “snack” or “meal” labels. Further augment categorization by adopting a color/size code that indicates the overall healthiness of a product.
2. Assign letter grades for overall nutritional value or even a product’s eco-footprint.
3. Create a label communicating the exercise necessary to burn off the calories in the food.
4. Leverage mobile applications that promote interactivity and transparency among consumers.

This entry was posted August 30th, 2011 by James Lowry in Food Labels | No Comments »

Here at Lightning Labels, we take great pride in producing professional, high-quality labels. And because our digital printing technology allows us to keep our prices on small orders affordable, we attract a lot of young businesses that are producing some truly  innovative products.

Betsy Wallace is one such customer. Betsy owns The Baby Foodies, a company that makes seasoning mixes designed specifically for infants so that parents can safely introduce new flavors to their children without worrying about loading… Read the rest of LL Great Resource for Small Businesses Competing for Shelf Space, Customer Says

This entry was posted September 13th, 2010 by Christy Correll in Customer Focus, Food Labels | No Comments »