Eye-catching designs are one way to make your food packaging stand out on the shelf, but quality printing goes beyond what graphics alone can achieve. Traditionally, many of the specialty substrates, inks, and coatings were only available for offset printing, limiting the solutions available for small-to-medium sized brands. The following technologies provide alternatives that are more feasible for shorter production runs and are better suited to smaller brands.

By changing the way that consumers shop, digital retail giant Amazon is redefining how manufacturers bring their products to market. Amazon reports that more than 50% of the products sold on their website come from small businesses. These items are marketed as a specially curated selection and sourced from manufacturers ranging from family-focused entrepreneurs, artisans, and innovator-makers to women-owned shops. Amazon’s distribution and fulfillment services reduce significant barriers-to-entry that these smaller producers face. With an increased opportunity to break into a new and potentially highly profitable market, shoppers (and businesses) are seeing a shift in the size and type of manufacturer whose product is accessible to the masses.

More and more shoppers are considering the entire lifecycle of a product and its impact on the environment as part of their decision to choose a brand.

Here are five ways your product packaging can reduce its environmental impact or even sustain life:

With Easter right around the corner, store shelves are slowly starting to fill with pastel-colored and egg-shaped versions of our favorite products. We’ve uncovered examples of four growth-focused benefits brands have reaped from their special edition products. Let’s explore 4 ways major retail manufacturers revamped their products to earn these advantages in the market.

Combining relevant static content with the appropriate variable data provides a powerful and highly-customizable solution for your brand to leverage. Think about your weekly trip to the grocery store. Have you ever spent hours searching for the Coke® bottle with your name on it, or the Snickers® bar that matched your current mood? Do you rifle through the refrigerated section for your favorite yogurt flavor, or have you purchased a product that required registration? All of these examples highlight how variable data technology has useful applications in the day-to-day lives of consumers.