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This federal label is required
to ship across state lines. Courtesy of Will Holder. |
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Getting a Label
If you plan on having your product cross state lines, you have
to have a federal label. A federal label can only come from a federally
inspected plant. Your label is attached to your processing plant.
For instance, we have a separate label for our jerky and marinated
roasts than for our other beef products. They look almost the same.
The only difference is the establishment number in the circle in
the lower-right corner. That’s it. The plant that does your
processing will apply to the federal government for your label.
You need to have the artwork created – preferably on a computer,
so that changes can be made easily – then give it to your
processing house to have it approved. Some plants will provide this
service for you, usually at no charge.
Obtaining approval on your label can take as little as 10 days,
or many months, depending on how out of the ordinary your label
is and the experience of the processing company.
When we applied for our first federal label, it took quite a while.
Our processing house had never applied for a label with anything
strange like natural on it. Even adding that fairly innocuous word
apparently makes the feds nervous. Our label kept being rejected
over and over, and we couldn’t figure out why.
Finally, out of desperation, we hired a label expediter to help
get our label through. An expediter is a person who knows all the
guys in Washington who fret over the terms like natural and organic
and hormone-free. He gets paid a lot of money for knowing where
their offices are and what questions to ask when they tell him that
your label was rejected. And, most amazing, he can tell you exactly
what to change so that the label will pass. After months and months
of going around and around with our label, it turned out that what
was wrong was frustratingly simple. We stated on the label –
“Keep Refrigerated or Frozen.” It turns out that we
can say, “Keep Refrigerated” or “Keep Frozen,”
but not both. How could we have been so misinformed? Actually, in
the end it was not really very expensive (a couple hundred dollars),
and we should have hired the expediter a lot sooner.
While I would never claim to entirely understand the label approval
office, they seem to be getting more user-friendly. You can find
out more about labels and getting your approval at www.fsis.USDA.gov/home.
If you want to sell your product as certified organic, your label
as well as your processing plant also will have to be approved by
your state or third party certifier.
The easy thing to do is to team up with a processing house with
experience dealing with natural or organic labels or copy one that
has already been approved. Don’t try to do your advertising
with your product label. You will never win in a battle with federal
regulators. Make all your claims on your point-of-purchase material
or your product literature, not on your federal label. Anything
that you say on your federal label has to be approved by the feds.
That is time-consuming, at best.
If you want to say that your beef is better for you, say it in
your brochures. If you want to say that your beef is tender, say
it in your brochures. If you put it in your brochures, it’s
just your business. If it’s on your federal label, it’s
the feds’ business.
LABEL SOURCES
When you’re first starting out, especially when you are still
deciding what your product mix will be, go to a small printing company
for your labels. You want to order pressure-sensitive labels that
come on continuous-feed rolls. Your quantities will be too small
for a regular label company to be cost-effective. Most small printing
companies sub-contract with a to-the-trade-only label printer.
Make all your labels the same color (although you can create screens
of one color for more visual interest) and try to do them all at
once. You may have different quantities of each – 1,000 stew
beef labels, 500 sirloin steak labels, 500 tenderloin steak labels,
and 3,000 ground beef labels. Go with a standard size, as custom
sizes are a lot more expensive. Sizes usually run in 1-inch increments.
When your volume is higher (such as 10,000 labels or more), deal
directly with a label printing company. Most major metropolitan
areas have one or two. Look in the yellow pages. Get bids from two
or three if possible. Make sure to give them the following information:
quantity of each label, total quantity, size, ink color, color of
stock (the paper that the labels are printed on), whether the labels
need to be waterproof, and delivery location. Expect a four-week
turnaround time.
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