Packaging Copy Editing and Proofreading Services

Packaging is the only marketing communication a customer holds in their hand at the moment of deciding, and it is also a regulated document. The front of pack sells; the back carries information the law requires, in sizes and formats it specifies, competing for space with everything marketing wants to add. The two are frequently written by different people, approved through different processes, and printed together on an artwork that cannot be corrected once six hundred thousand units have run.

We edit what brands, packaging designers and manufacturers produce — front-of-pack claims and product descriptors, back-of-pack copy and mandatory information, ingredient and nutrition presentation, allergen declaration and its formatting, storage, preparation and usage instructions, on-pack promotional copy and mechanics, sustainability and recycling claims and labels, country of origin and provenance statements, certification and accreditation marks, multi-language and multi-market pack copy, variant and range naming and its consistency, artwork approval and version control documentation, and copy specifications for artwork studios. Our editors treat the pack as one document with two jobs.

The relationship between claim and substantiation is where packaging carries the most risk, because a claim on a pack is made simultaneously to millions of people and cannot be quietly amended. We work through these so every front-of-pack claim has its substantiation recorded and its wording matched to what the evidence supports — "no artificial colours" is checkable and "natural" is a word regulators have views about; so any qualified claim carries its qualification on the same face rather than on the back, since a claim and its asterisk on opposite sides of a pack is a claim without a qualification; so sustainability and recycling wording matches the actual disposal route in the markets where the pack is sold, because a recycling instruction that is wrong in one market is the version that gets photographed; so mandatory information is not compromised by design, including the legibility requirements; and so the version control is disciplined, because most packaging errors reach print through an approved copy document being superseded by an email.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including artwork before launch and formulation information. We are editors rather than regulatory, food law or labelling advisers, and we offer no view on compliance, claim substantiation or labelling requirements in any market — those must be verified by qualified specialists. What we can do is make the copy clear, consistent and correctly versioned.